Bankers hog limelight in bonus debate
Geraint Anderson, ‘Cityboy’, returns to the fray with a satirical look at Britain’s top bankers
WHEN we Brits look across the pond at t he toothy men vying to be the Republican presidential candidate we smirk to ourselves at their idiosyncrasies: Mitt Romney and his Mormon underpants (‘to prevent temptation’!), Newt Gingrich with his plans to colonise the moon – even their names appear to hail from another planet.
I mentioned this disturbing fact to a former client from my banking days and he told me that if I was seeking out bizarre characters I need look no further than the gentlemen who run our biggest banks.
Since it was these men who would, in theory, be instrumental in dragging us out of recession I thought it worth assessing their eccentricities to see if the lunatics really had taken over the asylum.
There is a lone woman, Ana Botin at Santander, but she appears disappointingly conventional – if you leave aside over-use of the pashmina – so I’ve left her out.
While my discussions with various ex-colleagues from the Square Mile suggested that the heads of the big five UK banks are not as obviously wacky as the Republican presidential hopefuls (as always, the Americans do these things better than us!), if we scratch the surface we do find some pleasing whimsies.
Please note that this is a highly personal assessment of our leading bankers’ quirks and that I have used The Bachmann Index – with five points suggesting the full blown wackiness of Michele Bachmann while one point indicates only the minor and predictable oddity of a Herman Cain.
Stephen Hester (RBS) – Bachmann score: 3/5
HESTER’S predecessor Fred Goodwin had set the bar very high at RBS what with his Bond Villa instyle plans to take over the world and his preposterous sense of self-importance.
Hence, Hester was always going to struggle to be more absurd. Still, this bald, chubby chap had a couple of aces up his sleeve.
Firstly, his outrageously overly optimistic nature which resulted in him telling the investors of his former company British Land in early 2007 that he didn’t ‘believe we are about to see a (commercial property) market decline’.
This same attitude ensured that he clung onto his recent £ 1m bonus until the wolves were at the door.
Secondly, this former state school boy makes much of his modest upbringing, but cannot escape his brief flirtation with the hunting fraternity.
Images of him astride a hunter haunt him to this day.
António Horta-osório (Lloyds) – 3/5
THIS Portuguese businessman, table tennis champion and keen scuba diver who has a penchant for swimming with sharks (which must have been good practice for dealing with City bankers) has the slicked back hair and movie star looks of an actual US presidential candidate – which suggested great promise.
However, when he became head of Lloyds early last year there was nothing that indicated he was anything other than a diligent and smooth operator. Frankly, he looked like he was making up the numbers in t he ‘ Bachmann Stakes’.
That was until he pulled out the big guns and took almost two months off for ‘extreme fatigue’ at the end of 2011.
This was a master-stroke (that instantly took a billion off Lloyd’s market value) and transformed him from just another banker into an actual human being.
While that would have counted against him in most assessments of absurdity it was a genius move when it came to banking, where revealing one is an actual human being is one of the most unusual stunts anyone could ever pull.
Bob Diamond (Barclays) – 3/5
THE boyishly enthusiastic American sports fanatic with suspiciously dark hair (Grecian 2000?) showed early promise when, flying in the face of public opinion, he declared in early 2011 that ‘the time for banker remorse is over’.
This showed a more than out-oftouch assessment of the mood of the country.
He then showed true class by handing himself a £6.5m bonus confirming Peter Mandelson’s earlier assessment of him as ‘ the unacceptable face of banking’.
Now he professes to be very concerned about Africa and engages the St Paul’s protesters in earnest conversation.
Six months ago this trained pilot apparently landed the Prime Minister’s aeroplane flying back from Africa.
If that wasn’t an obvious attempt to remind Cameron who was really in control of our destiny I don’t know what was.
Stuart Gulliver (HSBC) – 2/5
AT first glance Gulliver looks like the kind of chap who’d consider putting two sugars in his coffee to be the height of daring.
He has ‘bean-counter’ written all over him and his only real claim to fame is that he has threatened the UK government he will move HSBC’S corporate headquarters out of Britain unless they stop being so beastly to bankers.
There was only one indication of delusional tendencies – that was when in May 2011 he claimed that firing tens of thousands of staff and removing retail operations from numerous countries was ‘not about shrinking the business but about creating capacity to reinvest in growth markets’.
Peter Sands (Standard Chartered) – 1/5
SANDS looks like a shoo-in to be the most peculiar UK bank CEO – a white-haired Harry Potter impersonator who perhaps cuts his own fringe.
Combine that with a pair of dark eyebrows reminiscent of Alistair Darling and his propensity to wear a plastic Swatch and you’re immediately optimistic about his potential score.
Unfortunately, he’s all mouth and no trousers – a victory of substance over style.
Despite resembling a superannuated schoolboy, he is actually a very serious individual.
Behind the scenes he and his top team essentially designed the bank refinancing scheme that Gordon Brown eventually implemented.
His only moment of madness was handing over his £2.1m 2010 bonus to charity – but whilst that may have resulted in him being regarded as genuinely insane by bankers, across the Square Mile the rest of us just thought he was a jolly nice fellow.