The City's apologists for unlawful conduct come crawling out of the woodwork

 A truly unbelievable story in today's Daily Telegraph catches my eye. 

The CBI chief John Cridland has written to The Times defending City banks over Libor manipulation and PPI criminal selling tactics. He was today expected to call on the government to put in place legislation that would protect banks from lawsuits related to the sale of products linked to Libor.

His point, apparently, is expected to say that businesses which sold products linked to Libor should be prevented from bringing legal cases against banks despite widespread allegations that lenders manipulated global borrowing rates.

Writing in The Times this morning, Mr Cridland said banks should be protected from lawsuits connected to Libor-rigging that could cost them billions of pounds.

"Banks must be held accountable for the manipulation of Libor and the Wheatley Review has set out a comprehensive and compelling case for reform," he wrote. 

The two things are however not connected. Making banks accountable has nothing to do with the proposed reforms identified by Martin Wheatley, another friend of city fraudsters, as rowans-blog passim readers will be well aware!

"But hindsight is a wonderful thing", says Cridland. It would be a dangerous precedent if banks were to be held responsible for products sold that related to Libor."

So, let me see if I have got this right. This rather strange man believes that it is perfectly ok for banks to criminally manipulate the LIBOR rate, thus generating criminal proceeds in the form of illicit profits, which they then launder through their own institutions, but anyone else who has thereby suffered financially, as a result of this manipulated rise in costs, should not be able to sue for damages arising out of others' criminal actions.

Hmmmmm, seems fair,  but only if you inhabit the La-La land from which Mr Cridland hails. 

Mr Cridland also called for new laws to curb compensation payouts from banks for mis-selling PPI and other financial products. He is urging the Government to introduce a legal time limit on claims for payment protection insurance compensation.

How does this work, I wonder? You have been criminally defrauded by a bank who lied to you and forced you to buy a financial product which was not of the slightest use to you, and they trousered a significant amount of money as a result. Now you have realised that you were screwed, not unreasonably you want to get your money back.

But Mr Cridland doesn't want you to have the right to do that after a period of time, and he wants the Government to pass legislation to prevent such actions being brought.

It does seem rather unreasonable that this man wants to deny you any sensible rights to recover any losses you may have incurred at the hands of the banking mafia. Is he someone with a significant degree of experience in industry or commerce? has he undertaken some years of work in the main floors of a major business enterprise, has he handled complex worker relationships and won business for his firm and the country by his work in foreign countries. Who is he to make these startling demands, and what is his experience of criminal fraud, so that at least we may be assured that he knows whereof he speaks? 

John Cridland, now aged 50 , has been with the CBI for nearly three decades and has been deputy director-general since 2000. He will be the business organisation’s 10th leader and the first to be appointed from inside.

So good so far! Born in 1962, he was educated at Boston Grammar School and studied Indian and African history at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He joined the CBI as a policy adviser in 1982, which would have made him only 20, but then he was probably very bright and very precocious, because he became its youngest ever director in 1991, at 29, when he took over the environmental affairs brief.

He moved on to human resources policy in 1995, aged 33, where he helped negotiate the UK’s first national minimum wage and entry into the European Union’s “social chapter” on employment conditions.

Mr Cridland has been responsible for the management of the CBI’s policy and membership activities and is a frequent spokesman in the media and on public platforms. 

Outside the CBI, he served on the Low Pay Commission from its inception in 1997 until 2007 and also as a member of the council of Acas, the conciliation service. He was on the Commission on Environmental Markets and Economic Performance and the Women and Work Commission. He was vice-chairman of the Learning and Skills Council until this year, is a member of the Cranfield University council and a local school governor.

Mr Cridland was awarded a CBE for services to business in 2006.

In other words, he is a typical and traditional policy wonk, who has spent his time on Commissions and Committees and Councils, discussing, debating, organising, writing thought-provoking papers, polishing the seat of his arse, and generally being part of the magic circle. One isn't told if he has ever done a proper day's work in any of the industries he purports to represent in his entire life, but I am sure if he had, we would have been told!

And this is the man who elects himself to urge Government to institute legislation protecting banks from civil suit from those who have been defrauded over LIBOR or who have been cheated by the banking mafia out of their hard-earned money.

If it wasn't so quintessentially British, you would have a job making  this crap up! First, through institutionalised negligence and lack of attention to detail, we have a regulatory regime that doesn't want to prosecute those it regulates for fraud, thus encouraging them, by a complete absence of concern and attention to their criminal activities, to carry on defrauding their customers and the rest of the world at large; and then we have some City apologist who then urges Government to allow the same criminals to be allowed a complete immunity from civil suit and an end to pay-outs of compensation for the effects of their crimes!

This is what the City financial sector relies upon, When things get bad, when the chaps on the inside have virtually brought the Temple of Mammon down around their ears, almost throughout history, some paid lackey, fellow travelling lickspittle, some well-fed and watered Tory M.P with his nose firmly in the City trough, or other industry poltroon can be relied upon to step up and demand an end to the public outcry, for a cessation to the banker-bashing, for protection from righteous anger and concern, for fear of damaging the ability of the City of London to make money.

And time and again, the Government of the day takes heed. People like Martin Wheatley are invited to step forward to promote their new proposals for change, but nothing gets done to meet the immediate needs of the crisis. It has been like that since the days of the South Seas Bubble and it does not change.

Read this guff by Cridland, and learn from its content. These are the people who live in a permanent state of denial about the crisis which exists in the British banking sector. But his state of denial is a dangerous one because it obscures the reality of the criminal culture which the banking sector represents, and which will, if allowed to continue unchallenged, eventually corrupt the whole of the British body politic. We have a duty to continue to challenge these idiots!