When will the criminal executives at Lloyds TSB be brought to book?
January 13th, 2009There could not be a clearer example of the collapse of corporate accountability in Britain than the case highlighted two days ago of Lloyds TSB being found guilty of criminal money-laundering over a 12 year period, yet none of the top executives responsible have been held to account. It is the most flagrant example yet of how leaders in business (and frequently in the civil service too) esape with impunity when a scandal for which they are responsible is unearthed. The lax regulatory and prosecuting culture in the UK desperately needs to be changed if criminal and corrupt behaviour at the highest levels is to be stamped out.
Lloyds TSB (now 44% owned by the taxpayer) has admitted liability for criminally and deliberately falsifying wire transfers of Iranian and Sudanese money into the American banking system in order to disguise their origin so as to conceal the breach of international sanctions. For more than 12 years (1995-2007) Lloyds conspired to move hundreds of millions of dollars from US-sanctioned countries by routinely removing customer names, bank names and addresses from payments so that they would pass undetected through US banking filters.
As a result Lloyds has now been fined $350m ((£230m) by the US Justice Department. However, none of the executives actually responsible (which may well reach to the chief executive) has been prosecuted, nor apparently are any to be penalised. Instead Lloyds, so far from expressing any regret, has contemptuously refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing at all. A Lloyds statement after the US verdict said: “We are committed to running our business with the highest levels of integrity and regulatory compliance”. A more breathtaking disdain for the rule of law which they have systematically violated for the past dozen years it is difficult to imagine.
Yet no person is being specifically held to account for this illegal money-laundering on a massive scale. In all such cases of corporate malfeasance the real perpetrators, not merely the impersonal corporation, should be brought to book and routinely prosecuted. Any such persons who are found guilty, in addition to being subject to whatever penalty may be prescribed, should be automatically debarred from any senior managerial or board position in any company in future, just as doctors or lawyers found guilty of malpractice are struck off and forbidden to practise in future.
January 22nd, 2009 at 9:19 am
Mr Meacher, I guess you’ve listened or read of Jim Rogers feelings about the UK bank bailout, and his thoughts that Britain will never recover from it. If he is right, then Lloyds TSB are not the only one’s to be taking measures against as Gordon Brown will have single handedly bankrupted our nation which requires a far higher penalty than any given against Lloyds.
Also, you might like to consider this, along with the “brush off answer” I received from the minister of Europe Mr Jim Murphy, which basically said it was “interesting”.
For the Record……
Detailed minutes of meetings held between Prime Minister Heath and French President Pompidou, regarding Britain’s entry to the EEC or “Common Market” as they called it, are available for the public from Margaret Thatcher’s archives.
http://www.margaretthatcher.org/archive/heath-eec.asp
Although the files are easily viewed in pdf online, I’ve placed the full records along with a sample in my documents folder here: http://www.scribd.com/people/documents/6689197?from_badge_documents_button=1
And on my blog here: http://rugfish.blogspot.com/2009/01/how-british-were-conned-into-europe.html#links
Meetings held between the two leaders concerning the future of both the United Kingdom and The Common Market are shown here to explain how and why the British Public were misled to believe they were being asked to join “just a common market”, when asked 2 years later to hold a referendum AFTER Heath took us in.
It must be remembered that we were not party to these talks, nor were the media, and that when we joined the “Common Market”, the British Public was not told of the consequences of joining as outlined 2 years earlier by these minutes and subsequent treaties which further integrate the country with the now “European Union”.
My storage holds a full account specifically of these meetings to make them easier to find when researching, and currently include the minutes of further meetings between Heath and Pompidou as given account by former British ambassador Lord Soames.
For the record, they are all freely available under the Freedom of Information Act and are of course no longer secret however they are not generally known and are much ignored as to the meaning of their content by today’s politician’s.
Margaret Thatcher’s account is thus; ( extract ) :-
Quote:
At the heart of the summit was a simple question, posed by Pompidou to Heath in their tête à tête: was Britain ready to make “a historic change in (its) attitude”, a “fundamental choice” in favour of the European Community? Although detailed negotiating points occupied much of the eleven hours of talks, the exchanges on this subject (at the beginning of the first and second sessions) mattered most. Heath was probably the first British Prime Minister in history who could have truthfully answered “yes” to that question, and he was very likely the only one who had a chance of being believed when he said it. His credibility in this respect drew heavily on his coolness towards Britain’s traditional ally, the United States, as to which he left Pompidou in no doubt.
A further account by the writer:
Quote:
For good or ill, the summit achieved everything Heath could have hoped; it was perhaps the highpoint of his political career. The entry talks in Brussels came to life the following month and outstanding problems were successfully resolved. The British Government was able to begin the task of pushing the necessary legislation through Parliament and bringing the sceptical British public into line.
Perhaps when you familiarise yourself with these documents which attest to the British Public having been duped, you could ask why and what is to be done about that too ?
I take time to read your blog and I agree with the things you say incidentally and hope you continue to promote your thoughts which make a lot of sense.
Regards,
Rugfish