Here’s the link to City A.M.’s article Vampire banks versus zombie firms
RBS is acting like a “vampire,” sucking the cash out of troubled firms as soon as it becomes available, Lawrence Tomlinson told MPs this afternoon.
Tomlinson caused a storm last year when he published a report into the treatment of small firms by the bank, arguing it took businesses with strong balance sheets and squeezed them hard, ultimately taking their assets and making money for the bank.
He gathered the evidence from 200 firms at the time and more than 1000 since, in his role as the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills’ entrepreneur in residence.
He met MPs of the Treasury Select Committee to give more details on the claims that RBS’s Global Restructuring Group (GRG) is engineering firms into financial distress. The video is here.
“When your business was moved into the GRG by whatever fashion, you were given perhaps a doubling of the bank’s interest rate margin and lots and lots of fees,” Tomlinson told the Treasury Select Committee.
“The business becomes strangled. It is frustrating to hear talk on ‘zombie firms’. I liken them more to a vampire business – they are kept in the GRG and as soon as they get any cash to invest and grow, it is taken out of them. I have seen firms face charges and fees that are set exactly at the amount that the firms have made.”
“The most serious allegation that has been made is that RBS conducted a ‘systematic’ effort to profit on the back of our customers when they were in financial distress,” said an RBS spokesperson.
“We do not believe that this is the case and no evidence has been provided for that allegation to the bank.”
The bank has commissioned law firm Clifford Chance to look into the claims, and the Financial Conduct Authority is also investigating.
- See more at: http://www.cityam.com/blog/1391011176/vampire-banks-versus-zombie-firms#sthash.CcjnS1Vm.dpuf
COMMENT SUBMITTED 22:49 30/JAN/2014
Having spent the past 43 years dealing with cases of corporate murder around the world and liquidating some of the best machinery and machine tool companies such as James Archdale, Redman Engineering, C.A.Parsons at Erith, Thomas White Woodworking equipment, Millspaugh engineering, and dozens more, it became clear that the vast majority of these companies were NOT insolvent – mostly they had full order books, good R&D as with Fairey Aviation of TSR2 fame – sacrificed for the Americas.
All of them had their plugs pulled – at critical moments – to aid other clients of the same banks to steal their business – Under the Statutes of Fraud Amendment Act of 1828 it is not illegal for banks to give “false Reference Dishonestly”. When the Korean’s purchased Doxford, Marine Engines, from us, we discovered that they were able to acquire the plant with funding from the CITY at 4% interest, whilst we were paying around 12/15%.
As Professor Tony Christer, confirmed in his inaugural lecture THE KINGS NEW CLOTHES at the University of SALFORD in the early 1990′s “Only 4% of companies liquidated in the North West of England were actually insolvent” having been duped into handing their assets over to insolvency practitioners who, in the words of Jonathan Gray, from Leeds: “ACT MORE LIKE MORTICIANS THAN PHYSICIANS”. Indeed the collusion existing between the Judiciary and the insolvency industry has been going on since Defoe penned Exchange Alley and Dickens wrote about Jarndyce and Jarndyce in his novel Bleak House although concerning a fictional court case in the English Court of Chancery, we now see thousands of similar dispossessions taking place 24/7/365 on forged papers stamped in the High Court – we have 5 going through the courts at the present moment.
Please see the report by Prem Sikka, Professor of Accounting at University of Essex “CONFRONTING CORPORATE POWER: THE ORDEAL OF TONY CHRISTER” which confirms this to be the case, as with that of Mr. Gedaljahu Ebert’s, contained in THE FORENSICS OF LEGAL FRAUD – being one of the reasons the Supreme Court of Israel has withdrawn from its 1970 Convention with Britain’s High Court Service, because of the Unreliability of rulings involving Cases of Insolvency.
Along with David Fabb, I gave a catalogue of evidence to Lawrence Tomlinson – which included the evidence contained in ECONOMIC TRIBULATION by Vincent Cartwright Vickers, a former director and deputy governor of the Bank of England between 1910-1919, which we are in the process of republishing, in which he states that the banking system is a non-productive, parasitical entity.
As it is 100 years since the Bank of England was saved from bankruptcy by the Secretary to the Treasury – John Bradbury – issuing £500,000,000 Treasury notes, stating that ‘Honesty even if (deemed) stupid, is a far better basis for finance than the most adroit finesse’.
Vince Cable, is to be congratulated for commissioning Lawrence Tomlinson to expose the rottenness at the heart of British banking – unfortunately what Mr. Tomlinson has brought to light is only the tip of a very nasty iceberg.
David M Pidcock. National Association for Victims of Fraud & Banking Malpractice.
pidcockdavid8@gmail.com
With a further comment by the author of the History of Usury:
That 96/04 percent figure between solvent/insolvent firms in the North-West that were subjected to Corporate Assassination almost beggars belief. The Americans introduced their ‘Chapter 11′ legislation as a defence against this sort of Grey-Suited Vandalism by the Banksters and Bean-counters with what is in effect Insider Corporate Raiding.
Chapter II gives companies…and crucially the many small firms who have supplied products and services on 30 to 60 days payment terms and are the innocent victims of this grey-suited vandalism, unlike shareholders who know share can go down as well as up…twelve months before the liquidators can start the fire sales. Whether this is enough to expose what is going on and develop counter measures (counter-blackmails?) is doubtful, because the means to gain redress are not in place. But on the face of it, it looks like a step in the right direction.
What might make sense in the UK is the right of immediate appeal to some independent public body…such as a court circuit or a Fairness Tribunal administered by the Lord Lieutenants of the county. This could be invoked by something like a two-thirds vote of shareholders and traders in the targeted firm when certain categories of insiders such as Banksters or Bean Counters seek to place a company in liquidation. If the company’s appeal is upheld by the court…fast 48-hour justice is required…then the Liquidators are served notice of a stay of execution with heavy three times penalties for any subsequent Contempt of Court—such as the liquidators conspiring to damage the reputation, net worth or share price of the target firm. Proof of solvency or a healthy order book prior to the attempt to liquidate is probably all the evidence that such tribunals should need to order a stay of execution. This circuit should be funded by a level on the usual suspects such as the banksters and bean-counters
Such a mechanism is probably already provided for in English Common Law so reverting back to it in the forthcoming Law Wars to give Common Law the rights to overrule EU Roman Law, UK statute law, NAFTA international law and the like may turn out to be all that is needed…and not the writing of new legislation with guaranteed lobbyist-friendly anti-English Common Law loopholes.
In the UK, there is one other destructive role that the Banksters & their grey-suited co-conspirators play in their capacity as company directors with close ties to remuneration committees, cross shareholdings and so on through their many interlinked shiny leather shoe networks.
Thanks to the earnest endeavours of the Wicked Witch with her de-publicizing of the National Family Silver in the UK, there is special public utility category of Corporate Murder, where it is not the corporation which gets murdered but its customer that get screwed by ever rising prices which protects the corporation and funds lavish dividends to unaccountable and untaxed shareholders and outrageous unearned salaries, bonuses and pensions to top executives at the expense of fair prices to the user and to suppliers of the energy, water, telecom etc utility.
This mechanism starts with the debt-free public utility being loaded up with debt after privatisation…after which the Margrit Kennedy effect kicks in, with the Banksters’ computers and bean counters taking it from there…while the victims either freeze in the dark…as their cost of living rises faster than both job- and on-job wages (benefits)…or make their way to the Citizens Advice Bureau where they are advised, since they can no longer apply for legal aid, to become litigants in person…clogging up the courts and threatening several of the legal profession cosy little closed shops. Welcome to joined-up Tory Government!
Re-commonising the utilities that Thatcher de-publicised is not beyond the wit of intelligent man. Nor does it cost the public purse an arm and a leg as the Thatcherites always try to claim. The State has powers, including several different powers to create money out of thin air.
So the State doesn’t buy out existing shareholders, but it follows EF Schumacher’s advice…he has an essay about this in the book of essays edited by Satish Kumar and published by Green Books…and uses its various powers of coercion to order the utility companies to issue new shares to the State to the amount of the outstanding shares (using perhaps the Kreuger Class B share device in reverse). At a stroke, the State then holds 50% of the shares in the utility…and will hopefully deploy them as the public trustee in the interests of the long-suffering general public and the real person victims of high fares, high energy prices and inflated water bills.
These newly issued public shares should not be used to prop up the profiteering by judicial persons like corporations, pension funds and other assorted trusts and hedge funds, who need to be brought under public control by an upgraded 1571 Act against Usury with swingeing penalties which make their usurious activities unprofitable and (the Archbishop of Canterbury’s approach to the payday lenders).
_____
Or, in a nutshell: what’s so dishonest with our money system.
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