Posts under ‘Criminals’

Honestly, I had an interesting Sunday morning over the papers yesterday, looking at the latest German-Swiss tax evasion disputes, and comparing the German coverage of it all with reports and comments from Switzerland.
To cut a long story short, there’s a long history of wealthy Germans (and people from elsewhere) putting money in Swiss bank accounts, [...]

In a week that has admittedly produced several items of bombshell news, such as…
 

the Bank of England lending almost GBP62 billion to HBOS and the Royal Bank of Scotland in October 2008 and keeping the emergency operation secret for more than a year to avoid a collapse of confidence among businesses, investors and consumers; and

investor [...]

Always nice to be in London and spend some days working at Emap’s Greater London House, as I did from Monday to Wednesday this week! But again, I returned home with a decent cold… and again, that was mainly due to the environment provided by the nearby Travelfridge Euston hotel, so to avoid repetition I’ve [...]

Holiday season, which is good news for those actually travelling! And a time that feels like the iron hammer of big fat fate coming down on those left behind, sweating away at 30 degrees over nothing but a bottle of Coke (or was it Pepsi?), big piles of paper, and a dry black and dusty [...]

Wow. Bernard Madoff, American ex-financier and former Nasdaq chairman, was sentenced to 150 years in prison yesterday, for running a USD65 billion Ponzi scheme that affected or ruined thousands of private and institutional investors.
 
Apart from giving a rude awakening to formerly trusting people, foundations and companies, the case also demonstrated to the public how ineffective financial [...]

This was the fourth time I’ve been to Moscow, and always have I felt safe. Always. That is, until I was mugged by three people pretending to be business men and police near Red Square yesterday, while I was coming from a Pyaterochka store visit - which, as I would like to mention, had been [...]

Last weekend, I spotted a full-page interview with a former investment banker in Germany’s leading quality paper Frankfurter Allgemeine. To be honest, I’m not sure how representative her answers were for the industry (I’ve never been an investment banker myself), but her stories seemed to confirm some widespread perceptions anyway.
 
This is not meant to [...]

More than one in four consumers buy fake products, at least occasionally, and more than 60% of buyers do so deliberately. Particular openness can be observed among cash-strapped young people, according to a survey carried out across Germany, Austria, Switzerland and The Netherlands by Valid Research, on behalf of Germany’s branded manufacturers’ association, Markenverband, and [...]

I bought a report from the World Bank last month, for USD39. Paid for it with my business card, and received it a couple of weeks ago. Nice bumper book, around 5 cents per page.
 
Then someone got my card details and went on a shopping spree in Dubai, for the equivalent of EUR26,000.
 
The [...]