Author Archives: Richard Smith

The Glam and The Scam: Sauber Formula 1 Team and its Partner, Carbon Neutral Investments, Limited

The Sauber F1 team and their dodgy partners, Carbon Neutral Investments

How Novice Eco-Warrior Michael Bloomberg Ended up Looking as if he Endorses Carbon Credit Scams

Mayor Bloomberg stitched up by Italian Vogue and a dodgy financial firm: his image and words are being exploited to market carbon credit scams

New Zealand: Pseudo-Financial Companies, and GT Group, Both Still Going Strong.

By Richard Smith, who would be a member of the International Consortium of Interfering Bloggers, if there was such a thing.

The Cyprus File

It would be ironic if Cyprus, one the smallest countries in Europe with little over 1 million people and about 0.5% of the European Union (“EU”) economically, were to prove a key inflexion point in the crisis.

Ian Fraser: Stephen Hester, the Great Escape Artist

By Ian Fraser, a financial journalist who blogs at his web site and at qfinance. His Twitter is @ian_fraser. [An edited version of this article was published on pages 34-35 of the Sunday Herald on February 10th, 2013].

It has been described as the biggest banking felony in history … yet no-one has been prosecuted for the Libor fixing scandal. Ian Fraser looks at the RBS sacrificial lambs.

During Royal Bank of Scotland’s IT meltdown last summer, chief executive Stephen Hester referred to the risk “that you turn over rocks and find new things [that you have to clean up].” Last Wednesday, nearly five years on from the £45.5 billion taxpayer funded rescue of the Edinburgh based lender, a vast rock was hoisted aloft by three regulators. What lurked underneath was not a pleasant sight.

Ian Fraser: Something Sinister About the Lack of Prosecutions at Lehman Brothers

By Ian Fraser, a financial journalist who blogs at his web site and at qfinance. .

This is the first interview that Chicago lawyer Anton Valukas has given since the publication of his 2,292 page report into the bankrutpcy of Lehman Brothers on March 11th, 2010. At that time, Valukas found strong evidence of financial and accounting fraud designed to deceive investors at the defunct New York-based investment bank. Valukas is surprised, especially given Lehman Brothers’ rampant abuse of Repo 105 to disguise its precarious financial position in the quarters ahead of its September 2008 collapse, that the former Lehman Brothers’ chief executive Dick Fuld or any other Lehman Brothers’ director has been charged with fraud or related offences.

The Garrulous Insolence of Simon Thompson and Anthony Browne

A pair of idiots testing the patience of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards

The Incredible Shrinking HBOS Fraud

Reviewing the press coverage of the HBOS fraud charges, and asking some questions.

Ian Fraser: Corruption allegations, major fraud inquiries, links to pornographic magazines … and a luxury yacht. Welcome to the world of banking

Police are (still) poised to press charges against several HBOS bankers and consultants after a two-year investigation into large-scale fraud, money laundering and corruption involving the Edinburgh-based bank.

An Open Letter to David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, from Mrs N Turner

NC readers can find some of the background on Nikki Turner’s story here. 18 months later, five years after her own business was destroyed, and a full decade after the very beginning of the HBOS fraud story, she is still waiting for the police investigation to lead to a prosecution. Mrs Turner’s open letter was […]

Basel III: Dead on Arrival?

In my last post on Basel III, I suggested that we would soon see a silly game played out over the coming months whereby banks on either side of the Atlantic would alternate in securing more and more concessions on Basel III until the whole thing became manifestly pointless and got sidelined.

In fact it is all happening rather faster than that.

NC’s Guess About a Sean Quinn-GT Group Connection Just Got a Bit More Solid (But a Bit More Ho-Hum, Too)

More about a possible link between bankrupt Irish ex-billionaire Sean Quinn’s asset hiding activities and the Taylor family’s company registration businesses (GT Group and successors)

At Least Half of the 21,500 Companies Revealed by the Guardian/ICIJ Offshore Investigation Have Connections With Rogue Agent GT Group

The GT Global sham company network may be far bigger than you ever imagined.

Parking Basel: A Case Study of How Banks Stymie Regulatory Reform

Basel III’s getting nowhere in the US.

Raúl Ilargi Meijer: The Central Libor Question: Do We Want to Save Our Banks or Our Societies?

Raúl Ilargi Meijer, editor-in-chief of The Automatic Earth, wrote three weeks ago that Libor rigging was a criminal conspiracy from the start. Here he provides an update which summarizes how collusion between large banks and central banks/regulators allowed the rate-rigging scandal to continue unchecked, at the expense of society and the real economy, for decades. This is an edited version of Raúl’s piece.