Amazing But True

They could be showcases in Mr. Ripley's amazing exhibitions but we have become immune to some of the amazing statistics we have been fed lately.

I nearly cried when I found that Andy Hornby, the lad next door former Marketing Manager at Asda who rose to become CEO of HBOS and made a good and proper show of ending the Bank's life by clocking up a £10bn loss, has waived his right to a monthly retainer. In a show of public-spiritedness which will no doubt twang the heart-strings of every warm blooded mammal he has voluntarily given up his right to a £60,000 month retainer at the bank. If the details of the £10bn loss had somehow slipped past the press, I dare say he would have carried on drawing the money reluctantly as reward for crashing what was a perfectly decent bank at some point.

Of course, I dare say he learnt the art of asking for pocket-ripping retainers from Ron Sandler, who got his 'Happy Gilmore' monthly pay out for 'rescuing' Northern Rock which we now own as taxpayers. We all happily agreed to his £90,000 per month retainer and the fact he has pulled in an army of consultants to whoop it up on the taxpayer bonanza to 'put the bank right' again and even showed his generosity on our behalf by paying staff a 10% bonus just for paying the back some of the money they borrowed - from us.

Easy Money

Even that does not take the biscuit. My perennial blog target, John Thain, former CEO at Merrill's who did an 'Oliver' and asked for more bonus himself having wrecked the bank so much it had to be bought by BoA - he only wanted $10m. But he had the last laugh as the stingy Board turned him down. At that point they were not aware he had signed $billions in executive bonuses to his pals just days before the takeover at BoA went through, and had somehow blown $1.2m on redecorating his office which he has now admitted was a 'mistake' and has agreed to pay back. What a guy.

But dear old Fred Goodwin now former CEO of RBS, has proven to be a generous sort as well. Despite his bank clocking up a £30bn loss and has laid off 13,000 staff so far, tears will well-up when everyone finds out that just a few weeks before he got so unfairly sacked for busting the bank, he signed off several lucrative contracts to individuals to become 'global ambassadors' to RBS. With contracts up to 5 years, these 'ambassadors' include Zara Phillips, Jack Nicklaus, Jackie Stewart and Sachin Tendulkar - and their job was to just stand about ambassadoring. RBS was always a bit choked that rival HSBC had bought space in all airport jetways and so it began on a global campaign to hijack every sporting event it could think of and now sponsors Williams Formula 1 Team, the Rugby Six Nations (Wales are Grand Slam holders), the Nat West series in cricket, the British Open in Golf and the World Underwater Nude Tiddlywinks Championship this year in Watford swimming baths - this latter one is still pending approval as I only sent the application off this morning.

We should mourn 'Sir Fred' for his overwhelming largess. But that wasn't as generous as his leaving terms as he earned £4.2m a year and although he was rather spitefully not given a wedge of cash for his failure, he did exit with an £8.4m pension pot.

Bank officials are now a little bit cheesed off that they cannot undo some of these daft deals but that would mean someone getting off their backside, employing a decent lawyer, calling up Sachin, Zara and her brother Peter who oversees the Williams F1 deal in Asia for RBS, and telling them to take a hike. But that would be impolite - besides it's only a collective £200m of taxpayer money at stake.

Let's not stop there. As Gordon Brown surrounds himself with fabulously rich banking advisers which is a really great idea as they advise us all to bail out banks and allow them to carry paying themselves fat bonuses, we are slowly finding out his who's who of the banking world are some of richest, dodgiest fat cats of them all. Latest on the list of dodgy dealers is the former US Citigroup banker who managed get himself a $42m pay off. A mere 45 years old, Michael Klein, former Vice Chairman of making money at Citigroup, quit last July just before the spectactulars really kicked in and Citigroup had to get $45bn to save itself and got his massive pay off. So he would be superbly qualified to advise Brown on how to rescue the banking system, then.

Allegedly, the scoop at the Treasury, is that Klein has to approve everything before it becomes policy. Klein, now a freelance 'adviser', is described as a 'rainmaker' in the banking world. He certainly made it rain - it bloody well poured, all $45bn of it.

Failure Is A Good Thing

Clocking up $45bn and getting a $42m pay off is pretty spectacular even for a rainmaker. We see in business and sport that in fact it is far more lucrative to fail than succeed. In fact the more spectacularly and quickly you fail, the quicker you earn the value of your contract and resurface at a new job to start the jamboree all over again. Just ask Sven Goran Eriksson or Steve McLaren - there was zero incentive to succeed when you could earn as much in quicker time by failing. And the same goes for 'Big Phil' Scolari at Chelsea, who this week got fired from his wonder-job. Along with Jose Mourinho and Avram Grant, Chelsea have paid out a total of £28m to be rid of their failed managers (although in fairness Mourinho did win 6 trophies and Grant lost the European Champions League only on penalties).

You must think that Chelsea must have a small chimpanzee who makes out such stupid contracts. No way, it is the highly paid CEO, Peter Kenyon. You have to have real brains to be that stupid, believe me.

Of course, you would have to be really stupid to employ clever people who actually gave a damn about silly things at Watchdogs. They have really bared their teeth lately over at the FSA and copped an Essex Forex trader who allegedly had a £44m fraud going. Good stuff, they only missed the entire banking meltdown which has cost around £800bn so far in the process and the Madoff $50bn scam.

Good work everyone, bonuses and part time fat-cat jobs all round.

I Can Do That

The world would not seem right if we did not hear of a bit of management lunacy. We find this week that BT, that bastion of management common sense, is paying around 1,000 workers to do nothing.

These individuals are part of the Career Transition Centre and were set up to retrain employees to find work elsewhere in the business instead of BT resorting to redundancies. A noble thought, indeed.

Sadly, as the recession bit and lack of planning came to the fore, it meant that there are fewer posts to fill at struggling BT and last week it announced it has laid off around 9,500 workers. This has given rise to a large amount of employees who are languishing at home waiting for something to do. Cleverly, Ian Livingston, the CEO at BT, has focused his job cuts on consultants and contractors at BT - whole armies of them that sprang up to advise about how to outsource and ruin the business. The company has 90,000 UK employees and over 110,000 worldwide, some just sitting in small offices in foreign countries, advising. In fact, when you include contractors, BT had around 160,000 people working for it so the odd 1,000 sitting waiting to do something was neither here nor there.

You couldn't make it up.

Finally, Spare A Thought For....

Eric Daniels, CEO of the new Lloyds Banking Group who, with other banking alumni, was called up in front of the beaks this week. He described the takeover of HBOS as being expected to be painful but strategically good. Bong, a few days later we find £10bn went down the toilet and we, the taxpayer, stumped up for it - so yes that was indeed painful. Daniels should not have any excuse - the City did warn profusely that HBOS had been suicidal in its Corporate lending and many of their super bets have gone belly up including Stead & Simpson, Wyevale and Crest Nicholson.

Bless him - Daniels said that they would have normally have done a good deal more due diligence in such a takeover despite the obvious warning signs but frankly with a Government gun to his head he probably did not have much choice.

Now, on a final note about Andy Hornby, the former CEO at HBOS, who has given up his lucrative retainer, we will not have heard the last of him. After presiding over hiring and firing a £1m banker called Benny Higgins from RBS who had pleaded that HBOS should have a more conservative mortgage book so much so that HBOS sold only 8% of mortgages in the first 6 months of 2007, after Higgins had slashed the commission paid to brokers and advisers. Hornby fired him and soon spectacularly reversed that so that HBOS once again got to 22% of the mortgage market with some of the most daft lending and sales tactics you will find.

And he had the gall to ask for a £60,000 a month retainer - respect to the balls of the man. Now, who was the idiot who agreed to pay it? That's you, silly, the taxpayer. In fact we are stupid enough to unquestioningly pay for it all and will be doing so for some years to come.

The last laugh is on us.