british tabloids

LONDON — It has been three years since the British government bailed out Royal Bank of Scotland and the Lloyds Banking Group and nationalized the regional lender Northern Rock.

The three banks continue to be fully or partially owned by British taxpayers mainly because the government is reluctant to sell the holdings at a loss. Unlike the banks they ran three years ago, many former banking executives managed to move on in their careers. DealBook tracked down five of them to see where they are now.

David Moir/ReutersFrederick A. Goodwin

Frederick A. Goodwin: The former chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland is being widely blamed for the bank’s demise. Mr. Goodwin, 53, went on a costly buying spree at the height of the market that included the acquisition of ABN Amro and oversaw an expansion of the bank’s subprime loan exposure in the United States.

In 2008, the British government had to pump £45 billion, or $71 billion, into the bank to keep R.B.S. afloat. A condition of the bailout was that Mr. Goodwin would leave. The British financial regulator, the Financial Services Authority, cleared the ex-banker of any major wrongdoings last year.

Mr. Goodwin stayed at his house in the south of France for a while before returning to Scotland to join the architectural firm RMJM as an adviser on its expansion strategy at the beginning of 2010. He left the position after less than a year.

Most recently, Mr. Goodwin was in the headlines earlier this year when he sought legal action to keep British tabloids from reporting about an affair he had with a colleague at the time when the bank collapsed.

Mr. Goodwin gets a £340,000 annual pension from R.B.S., which continues to be about 80 percent owned by the government.

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty ImagesThomas F.W. McKillop

Thomas F.W. McKillop: The former chief executive of the pharmaceutical giant Astra Zeneca served as chairman of R.B.S. when the bank ran into trouble. When he resigned from R.B.S. in February 2009 after apologizing to shareholders, he was then pressured to also relinquish his board seat at the British oil company BP.

During a parliamentary committee hearing investigating the banking bailout, Mr. McKillop raised some eyebrows with his answer to a lawmaker’s question whether he was sure he understood the full complexities of the loans the bank had created. “You said ‘full complexities,’” he answered. “I would say no.”

Mr. McKillop, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry, seems to have turned his back on banking. The register of the F.S.A. lists him as “inactive.” The 68-year-old continues to be an independent director at the Barcelona-based pharmaceutical company Almirall and UCB, a Belgian bio-pharma company.

Royal Bank of Scotland, via Bloomberg NewsJohnny Cameron

Johnny Cameron: In the year when R.B.S. had to be bailed out, its investment banking operation, which was run by Mr. Cameron, had a loss of £3.6 billion because of bad credit bets. He left R.B.S. at the beginning of 2009 and wanted to continue working in the financial industry, but his plans were thwarted by Britain’s financial regulator, which had concerns about his role at R.B.S.

In April 2009, pressure from the Financial Services Authority forced Mr. Cameron to abandon talks to join the boutique investment banking firm Greenhill. A stint at the headhunting firm Odgers Berndtson was not successful either. He left after just a few days when the government-backed group that manages the taxpayer stake in R.B.S. withdrew a contract.

Mr. Cameron settled with the financial regulator in May 2010 and agreed to never again be a senior manager at a financial firm. The agreement freed the 57-year-old to take on part-time consultancy work for any financial firm.

Months later he set up Caps Advisory, a consulting firm, and joined Gleacher Shacklock, an advisory boutique in London, in October last year. He spends about two days a week at Gleacher, offering “his expertise in financing strategies” to the firm’s debt advisory clients, the company said on its Web site.

Rupert Hartley/Bloomberg NewsAndy Hornby

Andy Hornby: About two years into Mr. Hornby’s stint as chief executive of HBOS, Britain’s biggest mortgage lender teetered on the brink of collapse. A failure was avoided when the government brokered a takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB at the end of 2008. But the combined group crumbled under HBOS’s toxic loans and needed a government bailout.

The turmoil seemed to have harmed Mr. Hornby’s stamina more than his career prospects. In July 2009, Alliance Boots, a large British health and beauty product retailer, hired him as chief executive. But Mr. Hornby resigned earlier this year, saying that after “an intense last five years as C.E.O. of two major companies, I have decided to take a few months’ break.” Four months later, Mr. Hornby, 44, reappeared as chief executive of Coral, a betting company.

Richard Rayner/Bloomberg NewsAdam J. Applegarth

Adam J. Applegarth: The former chief executive of Northern Rock was the first top banker in Britain to lose his job during the financial crisis. Northern Rock, the British mortgage lender, ran out of money when global credit markets froze. The news spooked customers, who quickly formed long lines at bank branches to withdraw their money. The bank had to be nationalized and Mr. Applegarth was blamed for a flawed business model that relied too much on short-term financing.

Since resigning from Northern Rock at the end of 2007 and getting a £840,000 payoff, Mr. Applegarth was spotted playing cricket for his home team in Britain’s northeast. In 2009, he landed a job as an adviser to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management with its European distressed fund.

Last year, Mr. Applegarth, 49, registered a real estate company in Britain called Beechwood Property Management with his son, Gregory.

Article source: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/for-british-ex-bankers-life-beyond-the-bailouts/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Time and again in the United States and elsewhere, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation has used blunt force spending to skate past judgment, agreeing to payments to settle legal cases and, undoubtedly more important, silence its critics. In the case of News America Marketing, its obscure but profitable in-store and newspaper insert marketing business, the News Corporation has paid out about $655 million to make embarrassing charges of corporate espionage and anticompetitive behavior go away.

That kind of strategy provides a useful window into the larger corporate culture at a company that is now engulfed by a wildfire burning out of control in London, sparked by the hacking of a murdered young girl’s phone and fed by a steady stream of revelations about seedy, unethical and sometimes criminal behavior at the company’s newspapers.

So far, 10 people have been arrested, including, on Sunday, Rebekah Brooks, the head of News International. Les Hinton, who ran News International before her and most recently was the head of Dow Jones, resigned on Friday. Now we are left to wonder whether Mr. Murdoch will be forced to make an Abraham-like sacrifice and abandon his son James, the former heir apparent.

The News Corporation may be hoping that it can get back to business now that some of the responsible parties have been held to account — and that people will see the incident as an aberrant byproduct of the world of British tabloids. But that seems like a stretch. The damage is likely to continue to mount, perhaps because the underlying pathology is hardly restricted to those who have taken the fall.

As Mark Lewis, the lawyer for the family of the murdered girl, Milly Dowler, said after Ms. Brooks resigned, “This is not just about one individual but about the culture of an organization.”

Well put. That organization has used strategic acumen to assemble a vast and lucrative string of media properties, but there is also a long history of rounded-off corners. It has skated on regulatory issues, treated an editorial oversight committee as if it were a potted plant (at The Wall Street Journal), and made common cause with restrictive governments (China) and suspect businesses — all in the relentless pursuit of More. In the process, Mr. Murdoch has always been frank in his impatience with the rules of others.

According to The Guardian, whose bulldog reporting pulled back the curtain on the phone-hacking scandal, the News Corporation paid out $1.6 million in 2009 to settle claims related to the scandal. While expedient, and inexpensive — the company still has gobs of money on hand — it was probably not a good strategy in the long run. If some of those cases had gone to trial, it would have had the effect of lancing the wound.

Litigation can have an annealing effect on companies, forcing them to re-examine the way they do business. But as it was, the full extent and villainy of the hacking was never known because the News Corporation paid serious money to make sure it stayed that way.

And the money the company reportedly paid out to hacking victims is chicken feed compared with what it has spent trying to paper over the tactics of News America in a series of lawsuits filed by smaller competitors in the United States.

In 2006 the state of Minnesota accused News America of engaging in unfair trade practices, and the company settled by agreeing to pay costs and not to falsely disparage its competitors.

In 2009, a federal case in New Jersey brought by a company called Floorgraphics went to trial, accusing News America of, wait for it, hacking its way into Floorgraphics’s password protected computer system.

The complaint summed up the ethos of News America nicely, saying it had “illegally accessed plaintiff’s computer system and obtained proprietary information” and “disseminated false, misleading and malicious information about the plaintiff.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/business/media/for-news-corporation-troubles-that-money-cant-dispel.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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