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thomas davison

Bank robbers should bin their masks and become bank bosses... the skills are the same
By Max Hastings
PUBLISHED: 22:46, 25 June 2012 | UPDATED: 01:01, 26 June 2012

Buying a house is the biggest and most nerve-racking financial transaction in most people�s lives. A friend of one of my children was due to complete on a little property in Sidcup, Kent, last Thursday.

There were five people in her purchase chain, all of whom had furniture being loaded on to vans when she received a phone call from her solicitor.

RBS�s computer system had crashed: the promised money for her house was not there. She and everybody else in the chain was left sobbing. One couple spent the night in a local Premier Inn; others had to pay the cost of holding furniture already packed into removal vans.

Anguish: Millions of RBS and Natwest customers have had their bank accounts paralysed by an IT failure
On Friday afternoon, her solicitor managed to contact an RBS director who provided a guarantee for the money. Her deal, and those linked to it, belatedly went through.

Meanwhile, they had endured 24 hours of hell. So did millions of other customers of RBS � which owns NatWest � up and down Britain, who suffered days of anguish because money they were counting on to fund their lives had gone missing in the black hole of the bank�s computer system.

Yesterday, RBS�s boss Stephen Hester apologised, blaming a glitch during a software upgrade.

He should have started saying sorry almost a week ago: the bank has been responsible for a blunder on a scale that�s made its IT management seem dire (regardless of whether or not it has suffered a cyber attack).

Here is a bank 82 per cent owned by the taxpayer, which delivers a service to 17 million customers � and which has plumbed depths of inadequacy.
This institution distributed �390 million in bonuses to its investment bankers last year, despite group losses of �2 billion, while freezing the pay of 28,000 High Street staff.

Inadequate: RBS is 82 per cent owned by the taxpayer
The saga of the banking industry on both sides of the Atlantic exposes ever greater incompetence matched by ever-more iniquitous bosses� greed.

Whatever enormities the bankers inflict on the rest of us, they themselves get steadily richer. �Has there ever been such an outrageous one-way bet in the history of the industrial age?� demanded a critic this week.

RBS�s latest fiasco is making headlines, but its customer service generally is no worse than that of its rivals. Take Barclays, which I quit some years ago after one cock-up too many.

A friend of mine�s father had a safe deposit box at one of Barclays branches in Finchley, North London. This contained jewellery, some of it once belonging to family members who perished in the Holocaust.

When his father died, my friend went to examine the box, which had been untouched for a decade: it was empty, save for a few jewellery cases. It was unthinkable that his father would have sold the jewels or even removed them.

My friend had the only key. It seemed almost certain that somebody had stolen the contents. He was distraught, for reasons that had little to do with the cash value.

For months now, he has been locked in a wrangle with Barclays, who deny all liability and present a stone face, refusing even to answer such sensible questions as whether other deposit holders at the branch have had similar experiences.

I suggested that he is unlikely to get satisfaction, since he can never prove what the box once contained, though he has idiot of the jewellery. He says: �The heart of the matter is the bank�s refusal to engage. Just a blank wall.

�They have pretended to investigate, but send spurious explanations suggesting that the box was stored at the bank for nearly 20 years with no contents at all! Or implying that I stole the jewels and then complained.�

My friend�s lawyer says he reckons Barclays aims simply to keep the row in play until he quits because it becomes uneconomic.

This is the bank run by Bob Diamond, who trousered �23 million for his services last year (including payment of his �5.7 million tax bill), while Barclays� hapless shareholders sobbed into their soup.

A survey last week revealed that the average British bank robber makes less than �10,000 from every raid he carries out. What are such poor saps thinking of? Bin the mask, the sack and even the gun. Get smart. Become a bank boss instead � the skills are the same.

Iniquitous: Barclays boss Bob Diamond (left) was paid �23million last year, whilst RBS boss Stephen Hester (right) onlu waived his bonus after days of pressure from the press

These people have become today�s hotshot heist artists. They collect swag on a scale beyond the Great Train Robbers� dreams, and none of them goes to prison even when the figures show that they are pocketing millions for delivering disaster.

Their High Street branches stuff customers singly and their investment arms stuff whole countries � which is what Sir Fred Goodwin�s RBS did to the British people.

A new survey of top international bankers� remuneration shows that this rose by 12 per cent last year, while profits and share values slumped and the industry witnessed catastrophic failures and blunders.

JP Morgan Chase suffered a $2 billion loss from rogue trading, but its monster American boss Jamie Dimon keeps lining his piggy bank anyway.

Average bank chiefs� salaries now exceed �8 million a year. Antonio Horta-Osorio of our own lovely Lloyds collected �10 million, even though he spent two months on sick leave after suffering a nervous collapse � and his business remains in permanent nervous collapse.

The only reason these banks are doing any profitable business at all is that they are riding a flood-tide of almost free loans from central banks attempting to save the euro and avert a depression.

Shambles: Many of the problems facing RBS are the legacy of disgraced boss Fred Goodwin
I have a smidgen of sympathy for Stephen Hester, boss of RBS, who inherited a historic shambles from Fred Goodwin and waived his own bonus for last year (though only after several days of intense political pressure). But the rest of them are pillaging their businesses without shame, bringing the entire capitalist system into disrepute.

I cannot think why anyone would voluntarily sit down at a table with the likes of Bob Diamond. These people should be social pariahs. The phrase �High Street banks� once suggested something boring, cosy and reassuring, with somebody as pompous as Captain Mainwaring from Dad�s Army in charge. Walmington-on-Sea�s branch had no computer system which left its customers penniless over a weekend.

Nowadays, of course, it is all different. Diamond and his ilk see their businesses as giant shark tanks in which they themselves are the only occupants that matter, the rest of us mere prey.

Rival bankers jeer at RBS: they say it is doomed to be run by bunglers, because public opinion will not allow good people to be paid �the rate for the job� � for which read the grotesque sums changing hands elsewhere in the industry. Stephen Hester is thought hard done by because taxpayers give him only �1.2 million a year.

The bankers are confident they hold the rest of us so tightly by the short and curlies that we have to let them keep mugging us.

The computer glitch at RBS, which imposed misery and even hardship on so many customers, reflects a banking culture in which customers are treated with near-contempt by bosses reaping rewards many times greater than their talents, or even competence, justify.

It will be bad news for all of us taxpayer-shareholders � whether we like it or not � if RBS fails to recover sufficiently to be saleable.

But the first step on the road must be to provide a service that treats 17 million customers with respect. In this, the bank has failed abysmally in recent days.

However awful was Stephen Hester�s legacy from Fred Goodwin, there is no possible excuse for a betrayal of the public on this epic scale.

Let's get one thing straight; creating wealth and creating money are two different things. Creating wealth is all about building houses, roads, manufacturing good, ensuring the working people of Britain are healthy enough to create wealth by providing a welfare state ( including the NHS). These are real things. Money is a fictitious medium of exchange, oil to ensure that the engine of wealth runs smoothly. Nobody will tell you that they are wealthy because they have gallons of engine oil in the shed, they will tell you they are wealthy because they have a Porsche in the driveway. Oil is just something they put in it to make it run. Banks have a part to play by managing the oil (money) that lubricates the economy, but since when has creating money created wealth? That is solely a Ponzi scheme, set up in order to exaggerate the amount of wealth in a system so that the perpetrator can cream of their profits before the whole thing goes broke. Bankers create wealth only for themselves.

Funnily enough most of us would probably be quite upset if we knew how much Max himself earned, or how much his house was worth. Its all relative after all, and its not just the bank bosses who are earning stupid numbers, but the directors of all FTSE 100 companies. Its big business that has a disproportionate influence over how the country is run. They are the reason we are slaves to the EU, because it is they, not we, who benefit from its membership. And it is their money that corrupts politicians into passing new laws in their favour, and reducing taxes below even the lowest rate paid by an individual. It is big business that benefits from the massive immigration of low paid workers, not us, and to add insult to injury, we the taxpayers have to foot the bill to pay for Tax Credits to low paid workers, thereby subsidising the wages bill of big business even more.