Greedy Bankers to Face Prison as Chancellor Prepares New Law to Target Reckless Bosses Who Take Risks with the Economy

MAIL ONLINE: New criminal offence of 'corporate negligence' could punish financiers

Greedy bankers such as Sir Fred Goodwin could be jailed under tough new laws being drawn up by George Osborne.

Growing public outrage over the severe damage caused by the banking crisis has prompted the Chancellor to prepare a new criminal offence of ‘corporate negligence’ to punish reckless financiers.

The move comes just days before the annual City bonus season, which is expected to bring another round of bumper payouts despite the sluggish UK economy and families suffering a historic squeeze on household finances.

All three main parties are now competing to offer the most hardline policies on tackling ‘fat cats’, after their internal polling revealed the scale of voters’ fury at the level of executive pay.

Under the plan, being worked on behind the scenes at the Treasury, legislation would be introduced to prosecute any boss of a ‘systemically important financial institution’ whose actions had a significantly damaging effect on the wider economy.

The plan would mean that the chief executives of the big five banks: Bob Diamond at Barclays, Antonio Horta-Osorio at Lloyds TSB, Stuart Gulliver at HSBC, Ana Botin at Santander and Sir Fred’s successor at RBS, Stephen Hester – would all be at risk of imprisonment if they ‘crashed’ the banks and damaged the economy through their actions. » | Glen Owen | Saturday, January 07, 2012

We Are Paid Too Much, Bankers Confess in St Paul's Survey
THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY: As politicians shift ground on high earners, City workers admit public sector gets raw deal

British bankers have admitted that they are paid too much, a report into moral standards in the City of London will reveal tomorrow.

A survey of 500 workers in City financial institutions, carried out for the Christian think-tank St Paul's Institute, found that "a substantial number" believed they were overpaid compared with other professions – particularly frontline workers including teachers and, most of all, nurses.

The results will fuel continuing bitterness towards the industry over its culpability for the financial crisis and its apparent failure to rein in huge salaries and bonuses . Last night The Sunday Times reported the publicly owned Royal Bank of Scotland is planning to pay its investment bankers about £500m in bonuses.

The Archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, yesterday joined the attack on bankers' pay, claiming excesses in the financial sector had helped to create huge inequalities in wealth, "demonstrating how scandalously unfair our society is". » | MATT THOMAS, BRIAN BRADY | Sunday, November 06, 2011

Bankers Party Like Recession Never Happened
SKY NEWS: Over 1000 bankers have been quaffing champagne like the recession never happened at the largest City party since the economic crash of 2007.

The Man We Love to Hate: Mr Goldman Sachs
THE SUNDAY TIMES: Number 85 Broad Street, a dull, rust-coloured office block in lower Manhattan, doesn’t look like a place to stop and stare, and that’s just the way the people who work there like it. The men and women who arrive in the watery dawn sunshine, dressed in Wall Street black, clutching black briefcases and BlackBerrys, are very, very private. They walk quickly from their black Lincoln town cars to the lobby, past, well, nothing, really. There’s no name plate on the building, no sign on the front desk and the armed policeman stationed outside isn’t saying who works there. There’s a good reason for the secrecy. Number 85 Broad Street, New York, NY 10004, is where the money is. All of it.

It’s the site of the best cash-making machine that global capitalism has ever produced, and, some say, a political force more powerful than governments. The people who work behind the brass-trim glass doors make more money than some countries do. They are the rainmakers’ rainmakers, the biggest swinging dicks in the financial jungle. Their assets total $1 trillion, their annual revenues run into the tens of billions, and their profits are in the billions, which they distribute liberally among themselves. Average pay this recessionary year for the 30,000 staff is expected to be a record $700,000. Top earners will get tens of millions, several hundred thousand times more than a cleaner at the firm. When they have finished getting "filthy rich by 40", as the company saying goes, these alpha dogs don’t put their feet up. They parachute into some of the most senior political posts in the US and beyond, prompting accusations that they "rule the world". Number 85 Broad Street is the home of Goldman Sachs.

The world’s most successful investment bank likes to hide behind the tidal wave of money that it generates and sends crashing over Manhattan, the City of London and most of the world’s other financial capitals. But now the dark knights of banking are being forced, blinking, into the cold light of day. The public, politicians and the press blame bankers’ reckless trading for the credit crunch and, as the most successful bank still standing, Goldman is their prime target. Here, politicians and commentators compete to denounce Goldman in ever more robust terms — "robber barons", "economic vandals", "vulture capitalists". Vince Cable, the Lib Dem Treasury spokesman, contrasts the bank’s recent record results — profits of $3.2 billion in the last quarter alone — and its planned bumper bonus payments with what has happened to ordinary people’s jobs and incomes in 2009.

It’s even worse in the US. There, Rolling Stone magazine ran a story that described Goldman as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money". In his latest documentary, Capitalism: A Love Story, Michael Moore drives up to 85 Broad Street in an armoured Brinks money van, leaps out carrying a sack with a giant dollar sign on it, looks up at the building and yells: "We’re here to get the money back for the American people!"

Goldman’s reputation is suddenly as toxic as the credit default swaps and other inexplicably exotic financial instruments it used to buy with glee. That’s bad for the one thing it values more than anything else: business. Being the prime target for popular and political outrage could put Goldman first in line for draconian new regulation. So it has, reluctantly, decided that the time has come to speak out, to fight its corner. That’s how, on one of those bright autumnal New York mornings when anything seems possible — even an invitation to break bread with the masters of the universe — I find myself walking past the security guard who held up Michael Moore and into the building with no name. I'm doing 'God's work'. Meet Mr Goldman Sachs >>> John Arlidge | Sunday, November 08, 2009

Michael Moore – Capitalism: A Love Story – Trailer

The Barefaced Greed of Bankers and Their Bonuses Beggars Belief
THE TELEGRAPH: City pockets are bulging with bonuses, says Boris Johnson. Have the banks no shame?

Photo: The Telegraph
If you pressed a rifle into the hand of the man in the street and asked him to choose between two targets – an MP or a banker – who do you think would get the bullet? Tricky, eh? It is hard to know which of these two formerly respectable professions has fallen further in public esteem.

Some people might hesitate, like Buridan's ass, the rifle barrel weaving indecisively between two such luscious hate-objects. Most people would simply call for two bullets.

But then let me ask you a slightly different question. Which of the two species has managed to steer itself most effectively through the crisis? Which type of cockroach has scuttled through the nuclear blast of public disapproval? On the face of it, there is an obvious answer, and it is getting more blatant by the day.

Most of the MPs I know seem to be in a state of nervous collapse. Some of them are on suicide watch. Some of them face the task of sacking their wives and selling the house, or possibly the other way round. Some face penury. Never has Parliament been subjected to such protracted humiliation at the hands of the people.

Then look at the bankers, the bankers whose high-rolling risk-taking triggered the recession that has so exacerbated public rage at MPs. The bankers seem to be waltzing off with a song on their lips and their hands in their pockets – at least, their hands would be in their pockets if they were not stuffed with money. And when I say stuffed, I mean bulging, bursting, ballooning with the biggest bonuses you ever saw.

London estate agents say they cannot believe the wheelbarrows of dosh that are suddenly crashing through their doors. Savills says the number of buyers from the financial services sector has risen by 48 per cent in the third quarter of this year, purely in the expectation of yet another ginormous Christmas bonus.

A knuckle-cracking realtor in Knight Frank's Kensington office says he has never seen anything like it: email after email from the boys and girls at Goldman Sachs. "We did our first Goldman's deal in June," he tells the FT, "and we are now doing five times as many for its employees as for any other bank." >>> Boris Johnson | Monday, October 19, 2009

Human Filth! Human Garbage!
MAIL Online: City bankers are set to pocket huge bonuses again, despite bringing the world economy to the brink of ruin.

Goldman Sachs yesterday promised thousands of staff - 5,500 of them in the UK - a 33 per cent pay boost after it returned to profit.

Other banks are expected to follow suit after benefiting from trillions of pounds in government bailouts.

Last night angry MPs condemned what they said was 'business as usual' for City fat cats. Goldman Sachs was accused of 'taking the mickey' out of taxpayers with such massive bonuses during a global recession.

The Wall Street bank, bailed-out with £6.7billion from the U.S. government only last October, has raised its bonus and pay pool for the first three months of this year by 17 per cent, to £3.1billion. Sachs of Gold: Six Months after Bailout Costing Billions, Greedy Bankers Reward Themselves with a NEW Round of Huge Bonuses >>> By Simon Duke and Olinka Koster | Wednesday, April 5, 2009