No end to retribution for BP
YOU j ust can’t get the staff these days. The eager trainee is a stock character in every office. Clayton Luskie, a wet-behindthe- ears oil trader working for BP in Texas, however, has taken the novice’s core skill set – dropping the boss in it, explaining to those with 25-year careers where they have gone so wrong, failing to make enough cups of tea – to whole new heights.
That stuff is mere child’s play to Clayton, whose employer faces a multi-million-pound fine for manipulating the natural gas market to boost its derivatives profits.
This came to light because he couldn’t resist boasting about the scheme to his superiors while on a training course.
When told he should confess all to his line manager, he compounded the problem by doing so on a recorded landline phone, ignoring the boss’s desperate pleas to pipe down.
Never mind: if young Clayton’s hopes of a career in oil trading have been thwarted, as I fear they may have been, he might find a berth in banking. More seriously, BP’s latest brush with the US courts and regulators, coming after the much bigger Gulf of Mexico disaster, raises questions over when a line will be drawn under the American fining frenzy that has afflicted the oil giant, as it has the banks.
Perhaps BP’s biggest misfortune in the US is to be ‘British’. Perhaps it is that it blackened its own name with the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, at a time when public disillusionment with big business in general was at a peak.
There is an arc to all corporate scandals, starting with the shock of discovery, moving on to firefighting, followed by retribution then hopefully by reform and a return to stability.
The worry is that, for various reasons, we are stuck in the retribution phase. It is hard to sympathise with companies such as BP and the banks that have caused so much harm to society.
But it is also hard not to suspect that they are now seen as soft touches by publicity-hungry American judges and regulators, false claimants and ambulance chasers.
Shriti on board
FORMER Labour minister Baroness Vadera has assembled a formidable portfolio of directorships since she left the political fray.
She receives £650,000 a year for chairing Santander UK, the British arm of the Spanish banking giant, for a contractual three days a week, and another £95,000 as a non-executive of AstraZeneca, the pharmaceuticals company.
She was yesterday promoted to senior non- executive at mining giant BHP Billiton, where she was paid more than £180,000 last year. That already impressive sum is likely to rise to around £220,000 if she receives the same amount as her late predecessor.
Everyone agrees that Shriti Vadera is a good operator and her close association with Labour has not done her any harm in the oakpanelled suites.
Baroness Vadera of Holland Park has a strong financial background, having worked for years as an investment banker and rising up through the industry’s male-dominated ranks.
She is also fortunate in that she is one of a relatively small number of women with the skills to be attractive to large international businesses, at a time when they are desperate to hire more female representatives to their boards.
All the companies with which she is involved, however, are facing big challenges.
Astra fought off a bid from Pfizer and is now struggling to prove it was right to do so.
Santander UK is yet to embark on its long-promised London float and BHP will be affected by the turmoil in China.
Is this clutch of part-time roles a stretch even for Shriti? Corbynomics ONE of Labour leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn’s ideas is ‘The People’s Quantitative Easing’.
Oh dear, dear me. What will we be offered next? ‘The People’s Ricardian Equivalence’? or maybe ‘The People’s Neo-classical Endogenous Growth Theory’?
It’s not very catchy and it’s hard to know what it means.
Printing roubles on a Soviet-era press, possibly? And who else would QE be for, if not the people? The aliens? The puppy dogs?
Apparently, The People’s QE will differ from the existing variety because it will be used to improve infrastructure.
A Corbyn-ite government, not the Bank of England, would decide how much money would be printed to improve the roads, the power stations and the high-speed broadband. That would mean, of course, the Bank would no longer be independent, which would be a retrograde step.
And we already have populist QE, with more than £20bn being delivered straight into the pockets of the people.
It’s more commonly known as PPI compensation.