Friday 20 May 2011

Al Capone, Fred the Shred and structural socio-economic inequalities


The thing about the Sir Fred of Shred super injunction that seems to be in the process of getting forgotten is the way the peer that raised it in the Lords neatly justified his actions by highlighting how the former RBS employee's employer had a conflict of interest policy for its employees.

Put simply, fuck all the super injunction freedom of the press some tart blackmailing a footballer shite, rather did one of the key archi-cunts of the credit crunch that is fucking the lives of hundreds of thousands of people across Britain breach his own company policies while an RBS employee and if so should he have been dismissed for misconduct rather than early retired on a multi-million package? This is the straightforward thing that needs investigated now.


The issue is NOT whether Sir Fred of Shred having a bit of illicit luvin' influenced his decision-making in ways that fucked the bank because that's (a) a facile idea and (b) impossible to prove. Rather, its did he breach a basic term of his employment and if so can we (a) revisit his package in an actually you can fuck off with no cash ya cunt type style and can we (b) have the heads of all those cunts who may have turned a blind eye on a stick as well please?

As an immediate P.S. its no exactly a new idea right enough given this or more famously Al Capone getting done for tax evasion. But, stickin' em with the technicalities delivers results and scares the willies out of all current company directors who know damn fine well they‘ve been a bit economical with the actualite in the past when it comes to their expenses claims. Oh shit, that last bit means it'll probably get buried/smothered by a different story. In the meantime eeeuuurrrgghh, imagine Sir Fred of Shred looming down on you sexy style with his cum face. Euuurrrgghhh.

A May 23rd PS - Is it Nelson in the Simpsons that points and says "ha ha, ha ha"? Regardless, the additional details now coming out about the Sir Fred of Shred's "romance" are brilliant. So according to this not only did he have an affair with a colleague he "oversaw" her getting her second promotion while elsewhere unnamed senior sources are letting it be known that neither of the chairman Sir Fred served under were aware of the conflict of interest; now you could fuck this up by trying to do some bigger picture shit like how this illustrates how he ran the bank as a personal fiefdom, but so fecking what, that's what all CEOs do.

Rather, the real issue is straightforward and remains getting Al Capone on his ass i.e. get 'em on the technicalities over TWO questions/potential breaches of company policy:

(a) Did Sir Fred follow his employers conflicts of interest policy as he was presumably contractually obliged to
(b) If not was he involved in any decisions where there was a clear conflict of interest he was contractually obliged to flag up (i.e. overseeing the promotion)

And lets be clear(a)applies to potential situations and is simply a point of principle that means the relationship should be flagged up regardless, whereas (b)could be an actual and therefore an additional issue and potentially a muthafuckin' smoking gun.

And lets also be fucking clear about the context here; terribly senior bods get terribly big pay packets both because they are clearly worth it, but also because they are regularly assessed on the extent to which they explicitly lead by example i.e. did Sir Fred deliberately withold information that might have adversely affected annual assessments of his performance (oopsy - if such behaviour wouldn't have affected it, then that would indicate there's one rule for the senior and another for everyone else, which is not a good thing to make public knowledge in HR terms)? Now this last part is the kind of wanky bullshit that gets explicitly included in annual performance reviews for very senior bods i.e. they get a bigger bonus the more of an example they set to us plebs. So what kind of example did Sir Fred set I wonder? Plus, the FSA is presumably mindful of the fact that the appointment of a senior bod at a systemically important financial institution was potentially tarnished by unmanaged and unstated conflicts of interest i.e. this shit actually matters big time in principle.

In fact fingers crossed the public interest now being taken in this might prompt the FSA to try and claim a real scalp. They might even engage some HR consultants and start going after the other cunts that fucked the UK economy by investigating their adherence to company HR policies (nah, I doubt it).

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