I read this morning that the BBC's expert on the credit crunch, Robert Peston, has discovered that Sir Fred Goodwin's pension pot is actually £16 million and that, as Peston understands it, the bank was not obliged to pay Sir Fred his monster pension, which, this morning, appears to have increased to £693,000 per annum. Indeed, if they had sacked him, they would not have had to pay him any such inflated pension at all. The government in the form of Alistair Darling, seems to be claiming that they didn't know. Well, as Mandy Rice Davies said more than 40 years ago "He would say that, wouldn't he?" How could they not know? Gordon Brown is seeking legal advice - in order to defend himself, I assume.
As a slight diversion, you may be interested to know that I am thinking of expanding our gym empire by investing all of our capital [and some extra borrowed capital] in a failed gym in Amsterdam which has lost it management team, is operating in a building about to be demolished and which is losing its customers at the rate of 10% per month. And if this doesn't make buckets of money for us my partner has agreed to pay me £50,000 per year for the rest of my life. Before I go ahead though, I just want to make sure that I have properly checked for any potential snags. At the moment it looks a winner if I can just get that extra bit of capital from a bank.
I see that HBOS has also lost a bucket of money in 2008 - but only £10.6 billion. How much toxic rubbish they will pass on to us the taxpayers is not yet clear.
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