I never expected an internally appointed review of Barclays to greatly rock the boat, and the Salz review doesn't.
This is all it concludes on tax:
Barclays appears to have been insensitive to changing political and public expectations around tax and to the UK regulators' expectations on openness and compliance with the spirit of the rules. In the view of many, this reflected a failure more generally to recognise its responsibility, as a major UK institution, to show leadership.
That looks like something very close to whitewash on such a sensitive issue.
I think we'll fairly call that an inconsequential whitewash.
These people really don't get it.
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It’s not even a whitewash – the printer was never loaded with the sort of ink that might let ‘unfortunate facts’ print onto the page.
The paper was probably of the highest quality and the binding likely to be superb but now the report can be placed at the back of the storeroom, the light turned off and the door locked so the report can gently gather dust.
Meanwhile, no doubt after a period of very public contrition, Barclays will quietly go back to work on tax avoidance schemes.
After all, such schemes provide income for the bank, the income goes on the bottom line, the better the bottom line, the better the dividend so the happier the shareholders – including the institutional ones like the pension funds.
Hmm…..why did they appoint Bernard Jenkins as C.E.O when he presided over the Barclaycard Protection Plan miss selling? He simply said ‘sorry’ on the news! So it seems you can wreck lives say ‘sorry’ and get promoted as well as stuff your wallet with bonuses. Yet the British public carry on urinating on benefit claimants! It seems if you preside over corruption in banking it qualifies you for a bonus and you use the ‘I didn’t know naffin’ guvner’ get-out clause that Diamond used. If they ‘didn’t know naffin’, then surely they should be paid accordingly.
I am not a fan of Barclays (and have moved most of my banking from them) but i’m not sure the PPI scandal really “wrecked lives”?
At margins it might
You clearly don’t know what financial stress feels like
That depends upon whether you were a self-employed person taking a protected load out at the time…..bearing in mind that I received two returns of PPI from two lenders who both assured me at the time that the insurance did protect self employed people.
The payments of nearly 3K from each was received well….not forgetting that it included compound interest of the “loan” I made to them !
Another family member received, last month, a 27K bonus from her bank in regard of their “errors” in insisting she took out PPI or they could not lend her money.
One person I worked with did rather better, having received not only the insurance back, plus interest, but also compensation in regard of the letter the bank sent after receiving his claim stating that they considered it a breach of the contract between them, and unless the claim was revoked they would close his account. Bad move.
Then there are the MILLIONS of people with credit cards which included insurance….and the amounts paid back keep getting larger….
I appreciate that there was huge miss-selling and that some have received very large (and obviously deserved) compensation. However I don’t feel that anyone had their “lives wrecked’ from making PPI payments. The miss-selling of interest rate swaps is a different story.
It seems this report tells no-one anything that they did not really know already. It is apparently meant to signal, under the authorship of an eminent establishment figure with warm cultural and charitable credentials, the return of Barclays to, one might say, the world the rest of us inhabit, but it requires no very specific or testable changes. We are told it cost £17 million to produce and the author’s employer, Rothschilds, were paid £1.5 million to compensate then for his 9 months’ stint.
I wonder what civil society could have done with that £1.5 million?