They STILL think greed is good: City traders make new boy eat 8 quarter pounders
... AND BOSSES GAMBLE HUNDREDS OF POUNDS ON HIM – UNTIL HE IS ILL
A YOUNG City trader was made to eat burger after burger until he was sick, while surrounded by baying colleagues in a humiliating initiation ceremony at his firm.
A video has emerged of the incident, which has been condemned as showing the worst excesses of City culture.
In the footage, the 23-year-old man – who The Mail on Sunday has chosen not to name – is seen to become violently ill while he and another junior employee each attempt to consume eight quarter pounders with cheese at their office in London’s financial district.
Around him, senior colleagues at Marex Spectron, an international commodities broker, chant raucously and stake hundreds of pounds on whether the pair can complete the challenge they have been set within the hour allowed.
An insider at the company said the degrading game involving young traders had been initiated by senior brokers purely for their amusement. The video begins with the 23-year-old victim sitting at his desk with boxes of McDonald’s burgers piled up next to him.
Wearing casual clothes on what was a ‘dress-down’ day at the firm, he is then urged on by the colleagues around him to eat eight burgers within 60 minutes. He is seen trying to force down mouthful after mouthful of food with gulps of water.
Obviously starting to feel unwell, he holds his head in his hands as he tries to regain his composure with the clock ticking.
One senior trader tries to ‘encourage’ the young man, shouting: ‘Have a good look at yourself. You’ve got three minutes to turn this round. It’s £300. Get on with it.’
As the young man becomes visibly ill, a female colleague gleefully exclaims: ‘Gonna chunder!’ Offcamera, the man filming the incident on a phone says with mock dismay: ‘I know what’s going to hap- pen. I’m going to turn this off and he’s going to be sick and I’ll miss it.’
As the young trader approaches the completion of the task, one man points out: ‘I can only count seven boxes,’ to which another replies: ‘Mate, you’re such a stickler.’
The man doing the filming then says: ‘Mate, he’s got two minutes left. He can easily nail another one.’
Moments later, and struggling to finish the final burger, the 23-year-old lurches off his chair and is violently sick into a waste paper bin.
Despite his obvious distress, one colleague shouts out ‘Eat it’ and there are cheers from members of staff despite others looking on uncomfortably. Some erupt in laughter as he buries his head in the bin and continues to vomit. One shouts out: ‘Oh my God. He’s chucked it all up. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. You can smell it.’
As the scenes of mayhem continue, computer screens displaying financial data from around the globe flicker in the background.
At its luxury offices in Bishopsgate in East London, Marex Spectron offers energy and financial brokerage services.
Last night the rite of passage was condemned as evidence that the culture of excess in the City which politicians pledged to stamp out after the 2008 financial crash was still very much alive.
Former investment banker Philip Augar, author of The Death Of Gentle-manly Capitalism, said: ‘We thought this sort of thing had died out after the 1990s. It’s more Wolf Of Wall Street than the professional image to which the modern City aspires. Initiation rites are a form of bullying and have no role in the workplace.
‘They encourage the formation of cliques which are particularly dangerous in an industry where trans- parency is so important.’ Last night a spokesman for Marex Spectron said: ‘We are aware of this incident, which occurred over a year ago. The individuals involved have been spoken to and the matter has been addressed internally.
‘The behaviour displayed here is not what we expect from our employees and we have made it very clear that we would take a recurrence extremely seriously.’
‘Initiation rites are a form of bullying’