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The Serious Fraud Office will bask in accolades now that after 22 years it has finally nailed former Polly Peck chief Asil Nadir on ten beefy counts of theft.
It does demonstrate comprehensively that the courts and juries can deliver in complex fraud cases.
As a result the SFO and recently appointed director David Green may gain a respite from the disparagement that has dogged it for two decades after a series of botched trials and investigations.
No one should lose sight of the fact that the Nadir case was fundamentally a simple one of the boss looting a public company.
Asil Nadir pictured arriving at the Old Bailey: The case proves juries can deliver in complex fraud cases
Or that the verdict is of no great relevance to the challenges facing the SFO today, as the case is antique and protections and governance have been totally overhauled.
What the public will really want to know is why, some five years after the great financial panic began at Northern Rock, not a single senior banker or financier has yet to stand in the dock.
This despite the fact that many of the greatest abuses, including the creation of exotic financial instruments, took place under the regime of light touch regulation in London.
In the last few months we have learned that the returns, profits and bonuses of the UK banking system have been built on wholesale abuse.
The Libor market, that sets interest rates for households, businesses and big corporate transactions across the globe was systematically rigged.
Some of our most respected banks HSBC and Standard Chartered – thought to have set high standards in probity – have been exposed by the US authorities as money launderers and cheats.
We should not be surprised, perhaps, that the gullible Royal Bank of Scotland was sucked into money laundering. But the distortion of values at StanChart and HSBC is breathtaking. One trusts that rather than sitting around waiting for the US Department of Justice and other authorities to do its stuff, a newly invigorated SFO is conducting its own probe with a view to seeing justice done in the UK.
Only this will satisfy the public that the City stable has been cleansed.
Busman’s holiday
The hassle of having powerful founding shareholders outside the tent rather than inside has been amply demonstrated at easyJet and Wm Morrison where the big men, Sir Stelios Haji-Inonnou and Sir Ken Morrison, still like to have their say.
But the constant sniping, even if it is well informed (as is the case at easyJet), can be a bit disconcerting for the rest of the investors.
So on balance it is probably just as well that Sir Brian Souter, who with his family still owns some 26pc of Stagecoach, hangs around as chairman. The departure of Sir George Mathewson from the top job is unlikely to cause investors to shed many tears given his role in advancing the career of Fred Goodwin at RBS and setting that bank on its madcap acquisition trail.
What is more important than Souter stepping up is that there is a sufficiently robust and independent deputy chair and a strong cadre of good non-executives. Whether Gary Watts, who already has five years on the Stagecoach board, can fulfil this role effectively may be open to question.
And investors will also need to be assured that Souter has an exit plan. It has not been the best of times for Stagecoach, the more invisible partner in Virgin Rail’s West Coast rail contract, which has been contentiously awarded to Scottish rivals FirstGroup. In his old role as chief executive Souter has done a reasonable job of keeping Stagecoach on the right path with UK regional bus operations, railways and the North American arm including Megabus putting in useful performances in the first quarter. Only London buses look to be underwhelming.
That will be for new chief executive Martin Griffiths to sort without, one trusts, too much intrusion from yesterday’s man.
Setting Sun
Amid the machinations in Greece, the push toward the US elections and China’s slowdown, the sub-octane performance of the world’s third largest economy – Japan – is too easily ignored.
Data coming out of Tokyo is grim. Exports, traditionally the driving force for Japanese expansion, slumped 10.4pc in July and are down 8.3pc over the last quarter.
This is a fall comparable to that at the start of the Great Recession in 2009. Consumer spending is in retreat, after several quarters of expansion. Growth is being held up for the moment from by reconstruction in the wake of the March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima disaster.
Japan is bracing for tough times and with Chinese output also stalling policymakers need to gird themselves urgently themselves if a hard landing is to be avoided
Read more: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-2192156/ALEX-BRUMMER-Now-bring-banksters.html#ixzz24PKI8cwW
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