Taxpayers starve as Goodwin eats caviar

Well, it’s not that far off the truth.

So let me just get this straight.

After tax, Greed is Goodwin will take home about £33,000 every month.

However, if RBS had been allowed to collapse he would receive just (I say ‘just’ though it’s a lot more than I and most others will ever get) £20,000 per year from his pension.

So... RBS has so far received more than £45 billion in public funds, which means the bank is 70-per cent owned by the taxpayer. Without such a bail-out, the bank would have collapsed, and all pensions would have been transferred to the Pension Protection Fund (PPF).

The PPF guarantees 100 per cent of final-salary pensions in payment, and 90 per cent of those yet to be paid, up to a maximum of £28,000 per year. As this amount gets lower if a member retires before 65, a member retiring at 50 would be able to receive a maximum of £21,952 per year.

Dr Ros Altmann, an independent policy adviser, told The Times: ‘Sir Fred Goodwin should be treated like any other member of a pension scheme whose company has gone bust – he should be transferred to the PPF. There is absolutely no social justice or rationale behind taxpayers propping up banks to ensure that chief execs get paid such obscene pensions.’

Greed is Goodwin

There was a time when a chap knew what to do in the event of a catastrophic failure on his watch.

It involved the whisky bottle and the service revolver.

Today we have the largest corporate loss in history from RBS - a mind-numbing £40 billion - and the man in charge is not only not blowing his brains out he’s trousering £650,000 a year, for life.

This is after he has not only brought down his own company, but wrecked the prospects and savings of countless others.

And it has all been done with the collusion of the government.

Shocking, shocking stuff. There seems to be no bottom to what the banking industry is capable of.

Boy marries dog

A toddler has reportedly been married off to a dog in eastern India in a bid to prevent his predicted death by a tiger.

The ceremony, at a Hindu temple in Orissa state’s Jajpur district, was conducted with all the rituals observed at traditional weddings.

It included a dowry for the bride - the village bitch.

The dog sported two silver rings and a silver chain, the UNI news agency reported.

Parents of the groom, 18-month-old Sangula, were advised to arrange the marriage when they noticed a tooth growing from their infant son's upper gum.

The growth was considered to be a bad omen in the boy’s tribal community.

Village elders believed it would lead to him being killed in a tiger attack - a fate preventable, according to tribal tradition, by marrying a dog.

Ancient terror brings horror to Borneo, shock

Looks like there could be a humungous monster out there in the forests of Borneo, gobbling up pigs, goats, people - you name it.

(Though maybe not as scary as the giant rat of Sumatra - and less likely to fit in you rubbish bin).

Locals reckon it’s an incarnation of the Nabau, a legendary snake more than 100ft in length and with a dragon's head and seven nostrils.

Villagers living along the Baleh river in Borneo believe the mythical creature has returned after a photo of a gigantic snake swimming along the remote waterways has emerged.

The picture, taken by a member of a disaster team monitoring flood regions by helicopter, has sparked a huge debate about whether the photos are genuine or merely the work of photo-editing software.

Even the respected New Straits Times newspaper in Kuala Lumpur has asked readers to make up their own minds about the photos.

People who have studied the photograph of the shape taken from the air have dismissed suggestions that it's a log.

As one writer asked: 'A log can't be that winding, can it?' Others have suggested it's a speedboat, but this has been dismissed because of the twisting wake.

The most common accusation is that the photo has simply been manipulated on a computer, while others complain that the river is a different colour to the real Baleh river which is a murky brown.

But villagers who insist the snake exists say that photos of the creature being taken in different parts of the river prove it is swimming about.

Earlier this month scientists unearthed the fossil of a killer snake that was longer than a bus, as heavy as a small car and which could swallow an animal the size of a cow.

The 45ft long monster - named Titanoboa - was so big that it lived on a diet of crocodiles and giant turtles, squeezing them to death and devouring them whole.

Weighing an impressive 1.25 tons, it slithered around the tropical forests of South America 60million years ago, just five million years after the last dinosaurs were wiped out.

Partial skeletons of the boa constrictor-like prehistoric killer were found in a Colombian coal mine by an international team of fossil hunters.

Giant rat of sumatra caught and eaten (maybe)

A chinese ratcatcher has caught a giant rodent – weighing six pounds and with an impressive 12-inch tail – in a residential area of Fuzhou, a city of six million people on China's south coast.

Says the Daily Telegraph (and you have to love the DT for reports such as this in the troubled times).

‘The ratcatcher, who was only named as Mr Xian, said he swooped for the rodent after seeing a big crowd of people surrounding it on the street.

He told local Chinese newspapers that he thought the rat might be a valuable specimen, or a rare species, and had to muster up his courage [I should jolly well think so] before grabbing its tail and picking it up by the scruff of its neck.

"I did it, I caught a rat the size of a cat!" he shouted out afterwards, according to the reports. Mr Xian is believed to still be in possession of the animal, after stuffing into a bag and departing the scene [maybe, but having read the last paragraph I wouldn't be certain Mr Rat hadn't been served up in black bean sauce by now].

The local forestry unit in the city identified the nightmarish creature [hang on, what about journalistic impartiality] as a bamboo rat from initial photographs, but said that it would need to examine the rat more closely before making a final identification.

Chinese bamboo rats rarely grow beyond ten inches and are found throughout southern China, northern Burma and Vietnam.
However, the Sumatra bamboo rat, usually found in the south-western Chinese province of Yunnan and in the Malay Peninsula can grow up to 30 inches long, including tail, and can weigh up to eight pounds.

A "Giant Rat of Sumatra" is mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes tale: The Adventure of a Sussex Vampire.

All bamboo rats are slow-moving and usually spend their time in underground burrows, feeding on bamboo. Chinese bamboo rats are often sold for meat in Chinese markets. The largest rats in the world are thought to be African giant pouched rats, which can grow up to 36 inches in length.’

More on why bankers deserve shooting

This from Simon Carr in the Indie on the subject of greedy bankers. Good stuff.


Latterly, the top performers were getting Renaissance fortunes, the second level got second homes and the failures got Porsches. How did bankers pull that off? They are just very, very good at getting their manicured hands on other people's money. Even now, in their chastened state, they offer to take their bonus in shares rather than cash. But the shares are 15 per cent of what they were at the height. When the value doubles and trebles over the next five years the directors will be vastly richer than if they'd been paid in money.

Yet there is something our leaders might say to these insulate beneficiaries. "We'll save your firms from bankruptcy but as your new owners we've got new rules. Existing bonus contracts are void. You'll get a utility salary with nothing on top. You won't leave for jobs elsewhere because there aren't jobs elsewhere. And if there are, you won't get them because you'll have a court case pursuing you. Yes, chum, if you bale out we will prosecute you for a) trading while insolvent, b) fraud and/or theft, or c) misfeance. Now unravel these securities and derivatives and get this bank back on its feet."

Many think regulation is the answer. No, revenge is the answer. You can't specify what people should do in every situation. It is incentives that guide employees. The risk of catastrophic personal loss in the event of losing the money they were entrusted with – only that will produce the culture of responsibility politicians are after.

Darling, poor fellow, is out of his depth in all this. He assures us he will squeeze out "excessive risk-taking" from the banks. He has no idea what that means. I speak as one who sold his house to buy talking clocks. Was that an excessive risk? I don't know yet, so how would he know? The difference is – the money at risk was mine.

Hedge funds, operating with their own money, behave very differently from banks playing with other people's. The funds were leveraged just 1.7 times (now fallen to 1.4 times). Banks were leveraged up to 50 times. The wildest hedge fund ever to go broke – Long Term Capital Management – was only leveraged 33 times. Banks went to play out on the margins of finance with our money and they took home billions.

Fair play suggests they should pay for their current failure with their houses, their Bentleys and their children's school places. They want to participate in success – well and good. The principle, as the PM used to say, is symmetrical. The Chancellor has feebly agreed that "contractual bonuses" are sacrosanct. But surely insolvent companies don't have the right to enforce such contracts.

And where has the idea of a guaranteed bonus come from anyway? What is this modern contradiction in terms we are locked into? The "bonus culture" has been smuggled into the public sector – quangos, councils, ordinary administrators, they're all at it. The philosophy is: "Thanks for the job offer. We'll do it on a work to rule basis. We can do it properly if you want – but it's extra."

The fact is, the "extra" that bankers got depended on how much they behaved like Nick Leeson. Leeson ruined Barings, these fellows ruined their banks. The difference is that Leeson went to jail.

Quote of the week

‘Liberty’s postbag suggests that the House of Lords is more in touch with public concerns that our elected government. Over the past seven years we’ve been told “nothing to hide, nothing to fear”, but a stream of data bungles and abuses of power suggest that even the innocent have a lot to fear.’

Director of pressure group Liberty Shami Chakrabarti

Clarkson labels Brown idiot cyclops

Jeremy Clarkson. I find myself warming to him. He’s doing very well to be so un-PC and yet to have escaped major disciplining by the BBC.

Now he has called Gordon Brown a ‘one-eyed idiot’. Terribly offensive, but very ‘on’ the Clarkson brand.

Speaking at a press conference in Sydney, he compared Mr Brown to Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, after Mr Rudd had just addressed the country on the global financial crisis.

According to The Australian newspaper, he said: ‘It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a world leader admit we really are in deep s***. He genuinely looked terrified. The poor man, he’s actually seen the books.

‘[In the UK] we’ve got this one-eyed Scottish idiot, he keeps telling us everything’s fine and he’s saved the world and we know he’s lying, but he’s smooth at telling us.’

Carol Thatcher in the doghouse

From the Guardian... (and everything else)...


Carol Thatcher faces being banned from the BBC after she referred to a tennis player as a ‘golliwog’.

Thatcher, the daughter of former prime minister Lady Thatcher, made the remark in a private conversation in the green room of The One Show after the broadcast of the BBC1 programme on Thursday night.

Sources have said that Thatcher will not be used again on the show, where she is a roving reporter, until she formally apologises to those who were offended by the remark.

According to insiders, Thatcher – who won ITV1 reality series I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! in 2005 – was chatting with The One Show host Adrian Chiles and guest Jo Brand about the Australian Open when she described an unnamed player as a ‘golliwog’.

Camo cow blasts bunnies

Ah, a mad cow story of a different kind. This from the Press Association...

Paul Coppen, 69, who supplies London's oldest restaurant with pedigree beef, was struggling to keep an army of rabbits from stripping his pastures bare.

So in an attempt to gain the upper hand, he camouflaged his vintage Massy Ferguson tractor as a cow - complete with a firing platform and a gunslit from which to blast the unwary bunnies.

He admitted the disguise - a black and white heifer painted on a wooden board fixed to the side of the vehicle - was not entirely foolproof.

He said: 'One of my neighbours, Stan Mitchell, came up with the idea and helped me out, and I just went with it. I hoped the rabbits would ignore the fake cow, thinking it was just another member of the herd, thereby presenting a stationary target for the rifleman as I drive about the farm.

'A driver-cum-rifleman was cunningly camouflaged behind a picture of a tree above the cow. Maximum angle of fire was achieved by pointing the air-rifle through a horizontal slit above the cow, not unlike the firing positions in Second World War pillboxes.

'It has to be said that not all rabbits are entirely fooled. Whereas cattle obviously do move around, trees usually don't and that may be a problem.'

Mr Coppen has farmed at White Close Hill, near Bowes in County Durham, since 1975. Beef from his herd of pedigree Belted Galloways - an ancient breed probably derived from Celtic stock - is supplied to Rules, of Covent Garden, London's oldest restaurant.

'I won't pretend this device is going to be the be all and end all of rabbit control - but it does seem to startle them somewhat and stops them from scampering away too quickly, which give us a chance to have a shot at them.

'Luckily, no cows have been accidentally shot so far and Granite Brain, the stock bull, has not displayed any amorous or belligerent intentions towards the glamorous heifer depicted on the side of the tractor.'