2009

Alistair Darling welcomes bonus pledge by banks - Chancellor welcomes Big Five's bonus curbs. HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds, RBS and Standard Chartered signed a new set of rules to tackle the culture of reckless financial risk-taking. Welcoming the announcement, Chancellor Alistair Darling said: "I hope that we cannot only change the way in which bonuses are paid, we can perhaps begin to change the whole culture and get things back on an even keel again." Eddy Weatherill, of the Independent Banking Advisory Service, added: "It does nothing to limit what these bankers are being paid, which is mind blowing to the ordinary person." - Daily Mirror 01/10/2009

Now bankers have the nerve to sue for £30m in lost bonuses - A group of City bankers is flying in the face of public anger and suing an investment bank for £30million in unpaid bonuses. The lawsuit, the biggest of its kind ever lodged in London, comes as the Government attempts to curb excessive payouts, which have been blamed for contributing to last year's financial meltdown. The 72 traders and dealmakers - all current or former staff of German bank Dresdner Kleinwort - claim they were paid just a tenth of the bonuses they were promised. Six of the claimants are demanding more than £1million each - despite Dresdner making a loss of £5.5billion last year.

Eddy Weatherill, chief of consumer group the Independent Banking Advisory Service, said: 'That sort of legal action will fuel others to attempt it. 'At some stage common sense must reign. It doesn't matter what economic cycle we are in, the bankers always come out smelling of roses.'

The lawsuit was filed as leading bank executives defended the City's bonus culture yesterday. Deutsche Bank's chief executive Josef Ackermann said banks were still vying to hire the best dealmakers by offering lucrative pay packages, and attacked regulators for putting 'too much focus on bonuses'. Meanwhile, Walid Chammah, co-president of Morgan Stanley, said his firm is 'against absolute caps on compensation levels'. - Daily Mail 09/09/2009

Backtrack on banking: Why Lloyds needs to be smaller, by the Chancellor who gave it a £17bn bailout - Alistair Darling has been forced into a major rethink over bailed-out super bank Lloyds. The Chancellor last night suggested that he wanted to slim it down to reduce its dominance after admitting that the financial sector needs much more competition. It represents an extraordinary reversal given that Gordon Brown rode roughshod over competition rules in personally approving the merger of Lloyds and Halifax Bank of Scotland last September.

Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Lord Oakeshott said: 'The Government have been making the rules up as they go along in the banking crisis and now they have been found out. Gordon Brown was only too happy to do a cosy deal which ruined Lloyds, and now they suddenly appear to have changed their tune. 'They are lurching from crisis to crisis.' Eddy Weatherill, of the Independent Banking Advisory Service said: 'Unfortunately we are left with a giant which has not been through the proper competition channels. 'HBOS was handed to Lloyds on a plate. 'To correct that, the Government has now got to take the merger apart again.' - Daily Mail 04/09/2009

'Customers pay' as banks rebuild - All bank customers are now paying for banks to rebuild - Banks and building societies are trying to rebuild their profits at the expense of customers, according to Moneyfacts. Michelle Slade, of the financial information website Moneyfacts, said lenders' potential profit margins were the largest they had seen since they started keeping records in 1988. "Typically we would have seen a 0.8% margin on top of their product. Now we are seeing a 3.1% margin," said Ms Slade. - BBC News 25/07/2009

Rhyme of the credit-hungry entrepreneurs - The new Enterprise Finance Guarantee and how the SFLGS became a nightmare for some small businesses. “There are a lot of sleights of hand that the small businessman may not understand,” says Eddy Weatherill of the Independent Banking Advisory Service, a membership body, “the SFLG has been consistently abused.”. - Financial Times 08/07/2009

Why bankers aren't worth it - Good analysis by Robert Peston, BBC's Business Editor, on how and why top banking executives are not worth the money they have been paid. - BBC Business Editor 03/07/2009

Examining HBOS - Background and more on HBOS by Ian Fraser - A must read for all who are involved or interested in what happened and how at HBOS. - 26/06/09

Anger as both savers and borrowers are 'pickpocketed' by banks - Greedy banks are "pickpocketing" customers by hammering borrowers while shafting savers. millions of customers hoped that with the base rate at a record 0.5% low the cost of credit cards and overdrafts would tumble. But Bank of England research shows they have continued to rise. the average credit card rate now stands at 15.88%, while overdraft rates are at their second highest level in banking history at 18.62%. Meanwhile, banks have axed savings rates to an all time low of 0.16% last month. Eddy Weatherill, of IBAS, said: "We are all being pick pocketed twice over. Firstly by the banks to bail them out of the credit crunch with huge taxpayer loans. And now by squeezing customers even more - so they can repay these debts quickly." According to data provider Moneyfacts, the margins lenders are charging on these deals have now reached their highest level since the credit crunch began. - Mirror 10/06/2009

Fraud allegations hit Bank of Scotland - Some very serious allegations were made against Bank of Scotland corporate division at Westminster this week, with a call for a criminal investigation by James Paice, Conservative MP for South-East Cambridgeshire. So serious are his concerns that he used a debate at Westminster this week to put them on the record, where he does not have to have conclusive evidence and can avoid the risk of being sued. MPs only use that privilege in exceptional cases. See Hansard for full transcript at 2 Jun 2009 : Column 43WH - This follows BBC Radio 4's "File on 4" programme, which last week reported some of the detail of the case - 06/06/2009

RBS fat cat Gordon Pell given £10m pension pot - One of the fat cats blamed for Royal bank of Scotland's spectacular collapse is walking away with a £9.8million pension, it emerged yesterday. - Mirror 07/05/2009

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Outrage over Barclay boss's £5million windfall -Barclays' highest paid executive is set to pocket nearly £5million after the bank sold one of its most profitable divisions - Daily Mail 10/04/2009

Barclays rip-off home loans are high street's worst - Barclays is today exposed as Britain's worst bank for fleecing customers. - Mirror 30/03/2009

£6M Bonuses at Bank of England - The cash bonuses were paid to staff for working overtime and weekends during last autumn's banking crisis - Sunday Mirror 29/03/2009

RBS chief gets £1.6 million pension ...and we are paying for it - Larry Fish's pension dwarfs the £703,000 being paid to axed RBS boss Sir Fred - Mirror 10/03/2009

Reckless lending means Northern Rock arrears soar 395 per cent - Northern Rock's careless dealings have led to a massive number of homeowners in arrears and fearing eviction. The bank's now infamous loans, which offered 125 per cent of the value of a property, have helped push up by 395 per cent the numbers of those more than three months behind with payments. Customers in this plight have soared to 17,264 homeowners - up from just 3,492 a year ago.

And 170,000 of the now state - owned bank's customers - one in three - are in negative equity, with homes worth less than their mortgage. Experts said the figures out yesterday meant a further explosion in homes being seized. Eddy Weatherill, of the Independent Banking Advisory Group, said: "The Rock's reckless lending is catching up with them. The rising tide of arrears and rising unemployment is a ticking time-bomb." - Mirror 04/03/09

Taxpayer money down the drain - Taxpayers have lost around three-quarters of the £37billion the Government pumped into UK banks just four months ago, it has been revealed. Labour has injected taxpayers' cash into both Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland in the hope of making them strong enough to ride out the financial storm.

In return for the £37billion handout, the Government has taken big stakes in the pair. The taxpayer now owns 43 per cent of the enlarged Lloyds Banking Group, including HBOS, and 70 per cent of RBS.

Since the Government made the rescue funding available the shares of both banks have collapsed, severely denting their value. Lloyds' shares were down 5p to 56.4p yesterday, giving it a market value of £10.3billion. Meanwhile, shares in RBS fell 1.4p to 20.5p, meaning it is now worth just £8.3billion.

This means that the combined value of the Government's stakes in the pair was just over £10billion last night.

Eddy Weatherill, chief executive of the Independent Banking Advisory Service, a consumer pressure group, said the bail out was 'certainly not the panacea that we were led to believe'. He said the Government should nationalise the two lenders in order to save the taxpayer from further pain. 'That's exactly where we are going,' he added. - Daily Mail 17/02/2009

Three million Londoners hit by credit card fraud - In the past 12 months almost three million people were affected in London - a 10 per cent jump - and nearly a third of all cases in Britain. The average amount stolen was £650 but six per cent had losses of more than £2,000. CPP said 42 per cent only discovered their details had been stolen after being contacted by a bank. On-line fraud is growing, while 21 per cent of cases involved card details being copied after they were used at cash points or chip and pin terminals.

Eddy Weatherill, chief executive of the Independent Banking Advisory Service, said: "There seems to be a problem with catching up with the fraudsters. Unless the figures get too high for the banks nothing will change." - London Evening Standard 28/01/2009

92% Rise in Repossessions - families are being evicted from their homes at a rate of one every seven minutes as the number of repossessions soars.

Eddy Weatherill, chief executive of the Independent Banking Advisory Service, said: “The Government initiatives are too little and too selective. They are merely PR and hype and in the circumstances are a disgrace. “They do not help the majority of vulnerable families now in serious trouble. We will see repossessions go beyond 1991 figures unless the Government makes vulnerable families their first priority.’’ - Daily Express 23/01/2009

Bank chiefs told: Hand back your £143m in bonuses - Pressure is today growing on Britain's high street bank chiefs to hand back tens of millions of pounds of bonuses paid out as a reward for their "success". MPs, consumer groups and shareholders said there was mounting anger at the vast scale of the performance-related payments pocketed by directors of the big five - now four - banks in recent years.

Eddy Weatherill, of the Independent Bank Advisory Service, said: "The banks have clearly made excess profits over the years and have dreamed up better and better schemes to pay themselves bigger and bigger bonuses until the bubble burst." The biggest single beneficiary has been the head of Barclays Capital, Bob Diamond, who has been awarded £21.3million in bonuses since 2005. - London Evening Standard 21/01/2009

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