Diamond forced into early retirement – LIBOR ated from £20m payout

Bob Diamond resigns as CEO of Barclays Bank which itself has been, so far, fined an estimated £200 million by the UK’s FSA and USA institutions as a direct result of the senior management team fraudulently fixing the LIBOR interbank lending rate.

In three separate penalties, Barclays will pay the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.K.’s Financial Service Authority a total of

$454 million. In the CFTC’s settlement, Barclays traders – with the assistance of senior management — are accused of attempting to manipulate the bank’s true funding costs, which are key to setting short-term interest rates that are used in roughly $350 trillion of financial market contracts. http://elitedaily.com/elite/2012/barclays-fine-signals-fraud-350-trillion-lending-market/

All the politicians are in agreement – “Bob had to go”; “…it was inevitable”; “It was the right thing to do”;  etc.; etc.; ad nauseum.

What a pile of incandescent POO! This fraud affects thousands of mortgage rates set during period of this man’s deceitful activities.

The man should be being charged with fraud, jailed, fined and his £100m assets frozen while detailed consequential losses are calculated!

Instead he is to spend more time with his family, friends, PR people and golf clubs while trousering a further £20 million in severance pay and bonuses etc.!(*1)

Diamond is getting away with an estimated $500 million fraud as his chairman and anyone else who feels a bit hot under the collar in Barclays senior management team!

Meanwhile in an alternative reality, Southwark Crown Court to be more precise (who makes up these unbelievable names eh?!), where criminals are fined, jailed etc. … “The 15th member of a gang involved in a £250 million VAT fraud using the supposed import and export of mobile phones, has been jailed today for nine years. Multi-millionaire Nasir Khan’s assets of £15million have also been restrained for his part in one of the UK’s largest ever ‘missing trader’ frauds.” See the full details on the HMRC web site

Why don’t the politicians Brown, Millibean, Osborne, Cameraman and Balls etc. call for justice here too?

Simply because they are just as culpable, if not more so; Bob Diamond knows this all too well and would drop them all in the brown stuff if they dared to do the right thing. All this happened on Gordon Brown’s watch with Eddy Milli-bean-Counter as his number 2, Osborne doesn’t want anybody looking at his dad’s tax affairs, Balls was even closer to Brown and as for Cameraman he was still trying to invent a safe PR shape for the Tory party at the time and had no interest in interest rates or such minor piffling matters ” … don’cha know”.

… and we the people all thought the Bank of England set interest rates …

So, “we are all in this together then” …

*1 – 10th July – Bob has “agreed” to reduce his Golden Parachute from £20m down to – err, not sure.