So who instructed Barclays to reduce its submissions to LIBOR, the London inter-bank offer rate which the Economist recently estimated underpins contracts worldwide worth over £60 trillions? On this rather crucial question the Treasury Select Committee has done a fudge. The answer apparently is – nobody.
Del Missier, the chief operating officer at Barclays, admitted he had told his staff in October 2008 to cut submissions after a conversation with Diamond, the chief executive, who was relaying a conversation with Tucker, the deputy governor of the Bank of England. So who was responsible for this colossal rate-fixing scandal which continued for 6 years – Diamond, Tucker or Del Missier? Continue reading
HSBC now looks to be heading for the biggest fine ever for Europe’s biggest bank. It stands accused of failing to properly implement money-laundering controls designed to prevent terrorists and others from using its services to advance their criminal ends.
Parliament was at its worst yesterday. The mud wrestlers Osborne and Balls were so dementedly determined to lay toxic blame on each other for the shocking LIBOR scandal that the City escaped with hardly a bruise to its name. The difference between a judge-led inquiry and a special parliamentary select committee inquiry is not that huge, but as at Ypres those few yards of terrain were fought over with such ferocity as though the next election depended on it. But one question hung over the assembled battleground, unanswered. Why were Osborne and co. so obsessively manic about blocking a judge-led inquiry? 
If anyone out there is still making the intellectual case for further banking deregulation, they are keeping strangely quiet right now. And yet for the longest time, an automatic presumption in its favour constituted the prevailing orthodoxy among Conservative and New Labour politicians alike.
