The dastardly Mr. Deedes
HSBC’s £2.1m-a-year chairman Douglas Flint, 61, who is replaced by oikish ex-Prudential chief Mark Tucker in the autumn, is unlikely to be honoured upon his departure. Scandals over the bank’s involvement in money laundering and Swiss tax dodging have put paid to that. Most of the impropriety occurred under the tenure of Flint’s predecessors, John Bond and Stephen Green, who bagged a knighthood and a peerage respectively, though I’m advised: ‘The sins of the forebears will be revisited upon Douglas.’
Ex-UBS trader Kweku Adoboli, jailed for fraud in 2012 after costing the bank £1.4bn in unauthorised trades, addressed the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners in London last week. Ghanaian-born Adoboli, 36, claimed he was a victim of UBS’s rapacious culture. He said: ‘Everything I did was for the bank and for my colleagues.’ The audience’s verdict? ‘Wholly unconvincing,’ I’m told.
Gangly inventor Sir James Dyson has composed his own coat of arms. Under the slogan Numquam Tendere Cessam (‘always keep striving’), the crest comprises an engineering clamp, a guitar, a shirt and a painter’s palette, each representing the creative industries father-of-three Dyson, 69, and his family are involved in. No room afforded to one of his bagless vacuums, the ingenious device he created after some 5,000 attempts, and responsible for bulk of his £5bn fortune.
Is the Chelsea Flower Show – the City’s premier networking event of the season – losing its allure? This year’s show will feature only eight ‘show gardens’ compared to 17 last year, after Harrods, Asda and L’Occitane withdrew their sponsorship. Organisers cite ‘uncertain times’ (that fit-all excuse du jour) but others point to the staggering sums spent on the annual schmoozefest. The average cost of a garden is around £300,000, though some are said to have cost £1m.
The always socially conscious Financial Times’ estimable How To Spend It supplement offers a helpful selection of objects no one should be seen without this spring. Highlight: A pair of men’s walking shoes, in alligator, by Italian couturier Loro Piana, yours for a trifling £5,670.