The dastardly Mr Deedes
Lloyds Banking Group’s appointment of retired High Court judge Dame Linda Dobbs, 66, to conduct a review into its toxic HBOS branch in Reading, will further enrage shareholders. What will Dame Linda’s expertise be costing them, I wonder? When she prepared a report on disgraced BBC broadcaster Stuart Hall last year, she and co-author Dame Janet Smith shared fees of £724,000, if that’s any guide.
Star fund manager Terry Smith, 63, who recently moved to Mauritius to escape the ‘noise’ of the UK investment sector, was back in the City yesterday for Frostrow Capital’s spring investment seminar. He appeared uncharacteristically chirpy and relaxed as well as sporting a deep mahogany suntan. The paradise island’s warm weather, sandy beaches and friendly 15pc tax rate is clearly doing wonders for the old cockney pugilist.
Oddball ex-Goldman Sachs banker Steve Mnuchin’s US Treasury team is enhanced by the arrival of former Blackrock executive Craig Phillips as an adviser. The Wall Street Journal describes Phillips, 62, as ‘a brilliant financier and a volatile boss prone to dressing down subordinates with expletive-laced tongue-lashings’. At Black- rock, colleagues says his blunt criticism would reduce quivering staff to tears. Sounds a proper charmer, doesn’t he?
The Queen’s banker Coutts & Co was Britain’s most complained about bank last year. The Financial Conduct Authority estimates the bank received around 15 complaints per 1,000 accounts. Since Coutts account holders are required to have around £500,000 in spare cash, it’s possible they feel entitled to a better class of service from their lender than most.
Finally, my apologies to BBC economics editor Kamal Ahmed, whom I accused of passing off comments Philip Hammond made at a ‘round table’ interview with journalists as though they’d been made to him personally. Kamal assures me the quotes used in his piece were from an interview he obtained with the Chancellor afterwards. I also erroneously put his age at 50. He is 49. Over my description of him as a ‘snazzy boulevardier’, however, I stand resolute.