Skip to content

Ritchie’s favourite banker

The Co-operative Bank’s former chairman Paul Flowers bought illegal drugs including cocaine, crystal meth and ketamine, according to a newspaper investigation based on video footage showing the clergyman handing over money for the purchase of illicit substances.

This is the one that Ritchie decided was the proper sort of person to take over the banking system, wasn’t it?

I’m sure I recall him getting very hot under the collar complaining about how nasty the regulators were being in trying to hold the Co Op Bank’s management to some sort of professional standard…..

13 thoughts on “Ritchie’s favourite banker”

  1. Well, at least he’s accurate:

    ‘In one report, Rev Flowers wrote of ‘the ever-increasing problems associated with drug use faced by individuals, families and communities’.

  2. Don’t have a problem with him, don’t have a problem with his sexual orientation. Do have a problem of him providing drugs to others and of being pretty bad at this Co-op lark. Still, its down to whatever oversight bodies exist including the police now.

  3. His private pursuits are only of interest because of the minister of religion bit which makes him a weapons grade hypocrite but looking at the Coop, it is well and truly buggered.

  4. My apology to Richard Murphy: if this is the banker you were were talking about then, yes, the banks probably do indeed conjure money “out of thin air” as you have been claiming.

  5. it is very hard to imagine the level of contumely and frothing abuse that would greet similar revelations about, say, Victor Blank the then-Chairman of Lloyds TSB if he’d organised orgies fuelled with illegal drugs and said that “he’d got one over on those Socialist cunts” after talking to Labour ministers…

  6. @Flatcap Army

    It’s worth noting the irony that Co-op has now sold out to the hedge fund mega-capitalists, and Lloyds Bank is still 40% public ownership and being told what to do by politicos and the EU like a good little puppy dog.

  7. innit – I think the Lloyds shareholders ought to succeed in suing Victor Blank out of existence given the way he railroaded through the purchase of HBOS without proper due diligence. Obviously it would be unseemly to suggest that his chat with Gordon Brown at a cocktail party at which the deal was hatched in any way touched on how grateful GB would be

  8. Given that Ritchie held Flowers up as his type of guy, why would any of this come as a surprise? Same hypocrisy, same lack of respect for the law. Why would this come as a shock?

  9. Here is is:

    http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2012/07/02/banking-2012-the-crisis-we-have-to-address-and-how/

    Before he removes it:
    “And heads need to roll. Whole rafts of senior bankers need to leave the industry: their mentality is corrupt and has to be swept away. There will be decent people who can take their places: have no doubt about it. But it will take leadership from a new type of non-exec director dedicated ti making banking work again that will let this happen. Again, I think such people exist; they’re just the outsiders now. The farce that the Coop was told recently that its board was not suitable to run a bank because it was not made up of bankers has to go: it’s precisely because people are not bankes that they may be suited to their new roles of making sure banks are clean”

  10. @ Flatcap Army
    Lamposts imply criminal law – sue means civil law which takes so much longer that some criminals get away with on the grounds that they are too old and stupid.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *