Andrew
Bailey, chief executive designate of the Prudential Regulation Authority, has admitted large banks had become too big to prosecute, raising 'very difficult
questions' for regulators.
Beware
these words, and know your false prophet! This is the start of a PR campaign to
try and make us believe that things are changing in the world of the banking
mafias! The new master of the regulatory sphere (the one replacing the
'toothless' FSA, as Her Majesty the Queen referred to it), wants us to believe
that under his watch, things are going to be different.
He is reported as saying that '...the largest banks have become too big to prosecute because
of the impact criminal charges would have on confidence in them...'
Well, I'm sorry, and please help me with
this, but isn't that the whole fucking point!
Banks survive, presumably because they
inspire confidence in their probity, their honesty and their transparency.
When you get a bank which admits, like HSBC
has just done, that it is nothing more than a low-life money launderer for
Mexican drug kingpins, and when it serves powerful vested interests to get
round internationally-ratified sanctions against rogue nations, what possible
benefit is achieved by trying to pretend that they cannot be prosecuted and
charged with criminal offences?
Oh, excuse me, it might impact the
confidence they enjoy? Whose confidence, their Mexican drug traffickers, their
international sanctions breakers, their global tax evaders, or the ordinary,
law-abiding clients who are entitled to assume that their bank will obey the
laws imposed on them and will provide a safe place of deposit? Perhaps I am
completely wrong and that these are the kind of clients whose confidence HSBC
and the Bank of England and the FSA, and the Treasury, and Old Uncle Tom Cobbley
and all, really want them to maintain!
They can't mean ordinary people, they have
already proven that they don't give a toss about their retail clients. A member of bank group HSBC, was fined a record £1.1m fine for defrauding
clients over PPI to its loan customers. PPI policies were designed to protect
borrowers from interest payments should they, for example, lose their jobs.
However, the Bank was found to have sold many PPI policies to people who would
have been ineligible to claim in any event. So small were the pay-outs, it is
believed that it kept as much as 80% of its premiums, making it one of the most
lucrative forms of insurance for banks.
Of course, why didn't I realise it before,
it is the criminals, the drug dealers, the fraudsters, the LIBOR manipulators,
the global tax evaders that George Osborne is depending on to keep the City of
London afloat! I mean, it is already too late for HSBC and Standard Chartered,
and all the other scumbag banks who have admitted their part in committing
ziga-gillon pounds worth of organised crime to try and pretend that they are
really nice banks after all. They are what they have admitted they are, they
are organised criminal enterprises, with a criminogenic culture, and it is only
right that they should want to attract criminal clients, and we should not
shrink from saying so.
To try and pussyfoot about with their
designation, which is what Andrew Bailey is prescribing, is simply to become
criminally complicit, in the erroneous belief that banks are above and beyond
criticism and remediation.
Confidence, what bloody confidence can
anyone have when they know their bank is an admitted criminal? When their money
is deposited with a bank that breaks the criminal law at every possible
opportunity, which cheats them at every turn, sells them fraudulent products,
launders drug money, evades international sanctions, moves foreign oligarchs'
tax evasion, safeguards the deposit accounts of Third World dictators and their
families, then what is that confidence worth?
If you want to deal with people like that
then go ahead, be my guest, and become tarred with the same brush. A man is known
by the company he keeps.
I don't personally care if half the banks
in London decide they can make more money by following these elevating
examples, but if that's the case, then we had better stop pontificating to
other nations on how to behave, we must stop agreeing to sanction foreign
governments, we must stop throwing our weight around at the UN trying to
provide a moral lead, we must stop
intervening in foreign flashpoints, because we no longer have any moral
authority, and it is all getting very embarrassing!
This is the lesson that Governments and
regulators and former Bank of England apparatchiks like Andrew Bailey never
fucking learn. They are so puffed up with the sense of their own importance,
they still think that it is possible to run a banking environment of which
Lucky Luciano would have been proud, and still maintain their spurious claim to
moral authority! Well, I've got news for them, you can't!
I have worked for a long time in the State
Bank of Pakistan for the Asian Development Bank trying to develop and implement
their Anti-Money Laundering rules and regulations, at the instigation of the
FATF. When we lectured delegates about the importance of implementing
procedures and processes which can interdict money laundering, the Pakistani
bankers and businessmen just laughed and shook their heads ironically, and said;
'Why are you coming here to tell us what to do? We are laundering so much money
into the UK, why don't you put your own house in order first before telling us
how to run ours?
Does Andrew Bailey know about this, does
Lord Adair (toothless) Turner, and if they don't, would they like to learn the
facts about it? I doubt it very much! Would they like to understand how
millions and millions of pounds worth of Pakistani drug money and the proceeds
of other criminal enterprises, including the vast sums of money laundered out
of Afghanistan for drug dealers and terrorists, enter the UK illegally every
year and are used to purchase businesses and housing property in Manchester and
Birmingham and the Metropolitan West Midlands more generally?
I seriously doubt they would want to know
about it, and they wouldn't thank me if I told them! But they can't pretend to
the bankers in Pakistan that Britain has any moral authority in this sphere,
because they know better and they continue to move their money through British
banks in Pakistan into British banks in Dubai and in the Gulf region, and on
into London and New York, because they know that no-one wants to know!
You see, part of the problem for Andrew
Bailey and his charming and cultured friends from the Bank of England and the Fundamentally
(Toothless) Supine Apologists, is that they just don't understand how criminals
work and think.
They come from an age when the London banks
were run, in the way my US friend, the Head of Enforcement at the SEC once said;
"...You British think that
those people who are responsible for the management of other people's money are
gentlemen, and you are shocked and surprised when you find out that the
opposite is true..." (See
Blog dated 12.12.2012)
For years, no-one ever questioned how the British banks were
able to make so much money, and why they were always being held out as being so
vital to British economic interests. They were run by gentlemen, who were jolly
nice chaps, and they made a shed-load of money. What no-one bothered to
understand, because no-one bothered to ask was 'how'?
The fact is that from time immemorial, London and its
attendant series of compliant off-shore Protected Territories were able to
provide complete security and secrecy for every crook, wide-boy, drug dealer,
tax evader, foreign dictator, etc etc on the face of the globe, and at some
stage, all that lovely money came through London.
The British couldn't have cared less how black the money was
when it started out, because the British could wash it clean, for a price,
naturally! After all, we had some of the best accountants and tax advisors in
the world to help foreign tax evaders hide from their governments; we had an army
of compliant lawyers who made a huge living out of providing tax-planning and
tax-litigation advice to foreigners. We had law firms who specialised in buying
up expensive houses in North London for wealthy foreigners who didn't like the
political or the tax regimes in their home countries, and who wanted to purchase
valuable real-estate; we provided some of the very best corporate formation
agents with access to every jurisdiction in the world. We had banks some of whose
specialist account managers existed to win, facilitate and manage the affairs
of the worst and most violent dictators in the world, organising systems to
help them salt away the money which had been sent in aid to their poverty-riven
countries, and which the President for Life had just sequestered from the State
Treasury. This was literally blood money, but we British didn't give a damn, as
Bernie Cornfeld once said, 'It's only money, and money has no smell!'
We have lived for years on other people's criminal money and
we have no intention of stopping now, we can't afford so to do. I have been
criticised so many times by both city businessmen and members of the UK
security services for making these observations, and I have been told so many
times that Britain needs to provide these facilities, that I have to believe it
is true!
Actually, it was the Roman Emperor Vespasian who first coined
the phrase but as I doubt many bankers have ever heard of the great Emperor,
but most of them will know Bernie Cornfeld, because they adopted most of his
crooked methods, I use the Cornfeld example instead!
We have grown used over the years to the influx of this
money, and frankly, if it were to be suddenly cut off for any reason, it would
cause some significant difficulty to the British economy, which is why Andrew
Bailey seems to think that really going hard against the banks and prosecuting
them for their criminal misdeeds would be so dangerous. He's not thinking about
criminal money, I doubt if such an unworthy thought had ever entered his
patrician head. No, it's the thought of bringing down a bank that worries him!
In a variant of the “too
big to fail” problem, Andrew Bailey, chief executive designate of the
Prudential Regulation Authority, has said that bringing a legal action against
a major financial institution raised “very difficult questions”. Some banks had
grown too large to prosecute. “It would be a very destabilising issue. It’s
another version of too important to fail,” he said,
This makes these
criminal enterprises too big to jail in Andrew Bailey's opinion. Why? “Because
of the confidence issue with banks, a major criminal indictment, which we
haven’t seen and I’m not saying we are going to see… this is not an ordinary
criminal indictment,” he said.
I am afraid that Andrew
Bailey is going to prove to be another in a long line of regulators for whom
doing nothing about anything is considered to be a positive option. This has been the problem with the British
way of Regulation since the beginning. The DTI were the most useless bunch of
financial regulators known to man, and not for nothing did they become known as
the Department of Timidity and Incompetence.
They used to ring up to
make appointments before exercising their investigative powers, and then were
shocked and surprised when they arrived at the appointed time to find that all
too often, the criminals had flown. I used to think it was just plain stupidity,
but I later found out that in many cases it was deliberate and that they hoped
that the offices would be empty because it would save the embarrassment of
having to do anything. Doing nothing was always preferable to doing something!
I have already
written many times how the FSA refuses to prosecute those criminals who operate
within its jurisdiction. Doing nothing means you don't get criticised!
So why do I say
that Andrew Bailey is likely to follow this path? Read his own words.
Mr Bailey admits that having told (FSA) staff
to get tougher on banks, it has been difficult to persuade them that a more
subtle approach might work better, particularly given their concern at being
blamed for not doing enough to prevent a failure.
“Not doing something is always regarded as
brave,” he says.
In my experience, subtlety doesn't always work
with men like Roberto Diamante, the Barclays former bankster di tutti banksters,
and I doubt whether Fred 'the shred' Goodwin would have been very amenable to
such an approach. It amuses me that Fred Goodwin already had a mafia-style
nickname before he was outed as another bankster!
I have finally reached the stage where I truly
fear that the Government and its senior servants know only too well, that the
British banking system operates in the ways I have described. I fear that they
truly believe that if they were to put too many barriers in the way of foreign
criminal money and tax evasion entering the country, that it would cost this
country dear. I believe that this is the only explanation which explains why
the systems and controls implemented to prevent and forestall economic and
financial crime, are so routinely flouted and ignored by those employed to
provide their oversight. I have reached the stage that nothing short of a
complete re-structuring of our banking and financial services industry, with
banks being broken up into much smaller component parts, and with the emphasis
on spiv financing being outlawed. with a proper group of trained and dedicated
law enforcers in post to deal with criminal activity.
Of course, they tried this after the scandal of
the South Sea Bubble in1720, outlawing criminogenic activities, banning the
short-selling of stock and generally trying to clean up the system.
But to no avail. The chaps in the City ignored
the new rules, like they had ignored the old rules, and everything went on just
as before. Exactly as they will next year and the year after that, whatever
Andrew Bailey may think!
2 comments:
The pusillanimous approach of the regulators is typical. As you rightly put it they are merely doing Cameron and Osborne's bidding in order to keep the supply of dirty money flowing through London. It is not just them either. The Parliamentary Committee is just mere theatre to give re-assurance to the us 'prols' that 'they' are doing something. If HSBC et al are too big to fail at least the rest of us now have a choice and one we simply HAVE to take. Those of us that have no mortgage (of which, thankfully I am one) have to close our accounts and move to alternatives like credit unions. The public has to get control of the bureaucracy and this can only happen with protest, passive resistance and consumer boycott. We have to let our legislators and law enforcers know and understand that failure to charge/prosecute is not an option just as it isn't for ordinary everyday offences like RTAs, theft, assault and more. Once we lose our trust in law and the justice system we are one step closer to anarchy. If 'they' don't get that message, even in the face of the too big to fail mantra, then society is another step closer to systemic failure. We have to keep up the pressure and remove through the democratic process backed these thoroughly wet bastards like the Lib/Dem cabinet and that bunch of anti EU loonies to be replaced by those of us who don't lack the balls to deal with the situation. Appeasement is what we have now and it will end in tears.
Keep it up Rowan. Ashley
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