Ousted Credit Suisse chief transformed Prudential before City regulator censured him
Tidjane Thiam is the scion of an influential family whose political connections and history spread across two West African countries: Ivory Coast and Senegal.
The 57-year-old came to prominence in the UK when he was named as the head of Prudential in 2009, making him the first black chief executive of a major British company.
Continue reading...The 57-year-old loses boardroom battle with Thomas Gottstein set to replace him
The Credit Suisse chief executive, Tidjane Thiam, has been ousted in the wake of a saga involving corporate espionage, an alleged car chase and personal vendettas that has sent shockwaves through Switzerland’s famously discreet banking community.
Thiam, widely seen as one of the finance world’s leading lights, resigned after losing a boardroom battle that erupted when the bank admitted to having hired private detectives to spy on former staff.
Continue reading...Labor claims that although six of the recommendations have been implemented, the government has fallen behind their set timeframe
Labor has attacked treasurer Josh Frydenberg for falling behind on the government’s promised timetable for turning the recommendations of the banking royal commission into law.
On Friday, to coincide with the first anniversary of royal commissioner Kenneth Hayne’s final report, Frydenberg said the government was “on track to meet the accelerated timetable” to implement royal commissioner Kenneth Hayne’s 76 recommendations.
Continue reading...More than a dozen people outside Vancouver courtroom with ‘Free Meng’ signs were promised C$100 for two hours’ work on a movie
Protesters calling for the release of a senior Chinese telecommunications executive arrested in Canada have admitted they were paid actors, in the latest twist in a closely watched extradition case that has chilled relations between Ottawa and Beijing.
More than a dozen people joined a demonstration on Monday outside a Vancouver courtroom where the Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou is fighting extradition to the US for alleged fraud related to sanctions against Iran.
Continue reading...US bank becomes the first to establish a no-go zone in the oil and gas sector
Goldman Sachs has ruled out future financing of oil drilling or exploration in the Arctic and said it would not invest in new thermal coal mines anywhere in the world.
The new environmental policy, which was released by the US bank on Sunday, was praised by environmentalists, though many warned that it was only a first step.
Continue reading...Australian federal police say livestreaming of children performing sexual acts marks ‘alarming shift’
Australian paedophiles are paying as little as A$15 for children to perform sexual acts online while being filmed in the Philippines, according to the head of the Australian federal police team in Manila.
Senior officer Andrew Perkins told Guardian Australia there was an “alarming shift” from previously more common types of “sex tourism” to “convenient and low-risk” online abuse of children which can be customised to the specific requirements of customers.
Continue reading...Westpac chief executive’s resignation draws little sympathy on all sides of politics. All the day’s events, live
And here is another indication of where question time is headed:
Last week, a bank broke money laundering laws 23 million times.
But instead of going after them, the Liberals are going after unions – trying to take away their right to exist.
This Government hates working people. We'll fight them every step of the way. pic.twitter.com/9vMhFquk4W
A group of north Queensland dairy farmers are on their way to Canberra to express their frustrations at what is happening within their industry.
That’s at the same time the Nationals are trying to get ahead of Pauline Hanson, who may have come late to the issues, but certainly has been running full steam ahead since becoming aware of it.
David Littleproud, the drought minister, some time ago said he fixed the supermarket [milk price] problem. He said he thumped his chest, waved his fists at them, and demanded they put their milk prices up.
Well, we know that solution lasted about five minutes.
Continue reading...The Westpac scandal has brought the role of financial institutions in enabling child sexual abuse into sharp relief
On 25 October plainclothes police barged through the red door of a family home in a dense neighbourhood in Rizal, a province two hours away from Manila.
There they arrested a mother who was allegedly sexually exploiting her own 12-year-old daughter. The 45-year-old woman was clutching her phone. Police took it and then handcuffed her.
Continue reading...Like the big banks, big tech uses its lobbying muscle to avoid regulation, and thinks it should play by different rules. And like the banks, it could be about to wreak financial havoc on us all. By Rana Foroohar
‘In every major economic downturn in US history, the ‘villains’ have been the ‘heroes’ during the preceding boom,” said the late, great management guru Peter Drucker. I cannot help but wonder if that might be the case over the next few years, as the United States (and possibly the world) heads toward its next big slowdown. Downturns historically come about once every decade, and it has been more than that since the 2008 financial crisis. Back then, banks were the “too-big-to-fail” institutions responsible for our falling stock portfolios, home prices and salaries. Technology companies, by contrast, have led the market upswing over the past decade. But this time around, it is the big tech firms that could play the spoiler role.
You wouldn’t think it could be so when you look at the biggest and richest tech firms today. Take Apple. Warren Buffett says he wished he owned even more Apple stock. (His Berkshire Hathaway has a 5% stake in the company.) Goldman Sachs is launching a new credit card with the tech titan, which became the world’s first $1tn market-cap company in 2018. But hidden within these bullish headlines are a number of disturbing economic trends, of which Apple is already an exemplar. Study this one company and you begin to understand how big tech companies – the new too-big-to-fail institutions – could indeed sow the seeds of the next crisis.
Continue reading...Mahathir Mohamad says amount is insufficient but a better offer might lead Malaysia to drop its demand for US$7.5bn
Malaysia has rejected an offer from Goldman Sachs of less than US$2bn in compensation over the 1MDB scandal, in contrast to the country’s publicly stated demand of US$7.5bn.
Malaysia has charged Goldman and 17 current and former directors of its units for allegedly misleading investors over bond sales totalling US$6.5bn that the US bank helped raise for the sovereign wealth fund 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB).
“Goldman Sachs has offered something like less than $2bn,” the Malaysian prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, told the Financial Times on Friday. “We are not satisfied with that amount so we are still talking to them … If they respond reasonably we might not insist on getting that $7.5bn.”
Related: US strikes deal with fugitive Jho Low to recoup almost $1bn stolen from 1MDB
Continue reading...Past crashes spawned new thinking and reform but nothing has changed since 2008 banking meltdown, says former Bank of England boss
The world is sleepwalking towards a fresh economic and financial crisis that will have devastating consequences for the democratic market system, according to the former Bank of England governor Mervyn King.
Lord King, who was in charge at Threadneedle Street during the near-death of the global banking system and deep economic slump a decade ago, said the resistance to new thinking meant a repeat of the chaos of the 2008-09 period was looming.
Continue reading...Public banks could allow government agencies access to low-interest loans for infrastructure or affordable housing
San Francisco and Los Angeles are moving forward with plans to create their own public banks following the passage of historic legislation that made California the second state in the continental US to legalize the financial institutions.
Experts say their success and that of other California counties and cities with similar plans will depend on the governance structures they put in place and the financing they are able to secure.
Continue reading...Several large companies have announced their departure, including Visa and Mastercard, a week after PayPal exited
Nearly every payment firm that initially agreed to join Facebook’s cryptocurrency Libra has backed out, in a potentially fatal blow to the social network’s plan for a worldwide digital currency.
Visa and Mastercard said on Friday they would no longer participate in the Libra Association and Latin American payment system Mercado Pago announced it would back out as well. Several other large companies have announced their departures .
Continue reading...Bank forced to shed jobs due to low interest ratess, Brexit and global tariff wars
HSBC plans to lay off up to 10,000 staff, more than 4% of its global workforce, as it embarks on a fresh cost-cutting drive, according to reports.
The cuts will affect mostly high-paid roles and come as the UK-based bank grapples with falling interest rates, Brexit and global tariff wars, the Financial Times reported. HSBC declined to comment.
Continue reading...Shadow treasurer calls for new banking inquiry after major banks failed to pass on full interest rate cut
Labor says the Morrison government should consider increasing the bank levy in response to the failure by the big players to cut interest rates in line with the central bank, and look at broader measures to boost competition in the sector.
The shadow treasurer, Jim Chalmers, told Sky News on Sunday the government needed to sign off on a new inquiry into competition in the banking sector by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and consider all options, including hiking the bank levy, after the major banks declined to pass through the full rate reduction following the Reserve Bank’s latest cut to the official cash rate.
Continue reading...Bank rules surveillance of outgoing head of wealth management Iqbal Khan was ‘wrong and disproportionate’
Credit Suisse has sacked its chief operating officer over an “extraordinary” James Bond-style corporate espionage scandal in which the bank hired private detectives to tail a senior executive and his wife through the streets of Zurich following a row with his boss at a cocktail party.
Switzerland’s second-biggest bank said on Tuesday that Pierre-Olivier Bouée had left with immediate effect after the board of directors ruled that the seven-day spying operation was “wrong and disproportionate and has resulted in severe reputational damage to the bank”.
Continue reading...Martin Shields and Nick Diable are accused of tax fraud in ‘cum-ex’ scandal that exposes City’s pursuit of profit
They have been called “the men who plundered Europe”: a group of cowboy traders, seasoned tax lawyers and mathematical whizz kids who are alleged to have conspired in the heart of the City of London to siphon at least €60bn in taxpayers’ money from the state coffers of several EU countries.
In Britain, the so-called “cum-ex” scandal, named after the complex derivatives juggling act employed, gained little attention amid the frenzied debate around the UK’s departure from the European Union when the fraud scheme was discovered in 2017.
Continue reading...UK pair accused of defrauding German state through ‘cum-ex’ share trading scheme
Two British investment bankers have gone on trial in Bonn in what German media have called “the biggest financial fraud trial” in the country’s postwar history.
The two British citizens, Martin Shields, 41, and Nicholas Diable, 38, are accused of having defrauded the German state of €447.5m (£405m) from London’s banking district with so-called cum-ex trading schemes, a complex shell game of share transactions.
Continue reading...Investors seek safe havens such as US treasuries and gold as the superpower standoff shows no sign of being resolved
Shares in Australia and across Asia Pacific have fallen sharply amid a new flare-up of US-Chinese trade tensions.
Despite a senior Chinese leader saying Beijing wanted to resolve the dispute with “calm negotiations”, indices were deep in the red on Monday.
Continue reading...Regulator had said it corruptly hired unqualified relatives of foreign officials to win business
Deutsche Bank has agreed to pay a $16m (£13m) fine to US authorities overallegations that it hired unqualified relatives of powerful Russian and Chinese government officials to win business.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alleged that Germany’s largest lender had used false books to record the hirings, which meant the relatives – known in China as “princelings” – did not have to go through rigorous interview processes.
Continue reading...