"You Are Football" cried the investment and retail bank.
"And You Are A Wunch Of Bankers" chorused the fans...
If Barclays Bank were a human being living in Britain, the individual would be sectioned under the Mental Health Act for a peculiar combination of psychopathy and self-harming.
If Barclays Bank were a human being living in California, three
strikes and you're out would mean that the bank would now be serving
four concurrent life sentences.
Systemic and sociopathic, private and psychopathic abuses AND reputational damage are the bank's core competencies.
By constantly pushing the boundaries of legality and illegality and then some, the bank invites chaos into its world and ours.
And has done so for decades.
It all started with the support of the apartheid regime in South Africa and, in the last half decade alone, we have witnessed accusations of money laundering, the senior management bonus scandal, subprime mortgage corruptions, tax avoidance via an elaborate circuit of Cayman Islands companies, promotion of tax havens, having to make tax repayments over false claiming of tax credits, fined for conflict of interest in the Del Monte buyout, while for its part in the Libor rate-fixing scandal the bank had to pay the FSA the biggest fine it had ever imposed in its history, the bank has also been fined for attempting to manipulate and fix the US electricity market, and then there is the ongoing Qatari capital raising regulatory investigation, and the major role played by the bank in the misselling of payment protection insurance etc etc.
But the biggest self-harming reputational damage is still to come...
... when, in the window ahead, it is shown that both systemic and private match fixing dominates the world's self-styled biggest league, the Premier League, Barclay's global image will take a further battering - the bank not only rips us all off repeatedly but also profits from a brand that is destroying our sport.
Disinvest or close your accounts with this monstrosity now.
© Football is Fixed 2006-2014
