Hypocrisy and hyperbole: who’s got a hold on who at the Daily Telegraph?

Dark Horses and dirty deeds in the stables at Lloyds Bank

In the context of the biased, lightweight, and clearly MI6 dictated set of inaccurate hate emerging from the closed ranks of the Daily Telegraph last weekend, one might wonder if DT doesn’t in fact stand for delerium tremens these days. But there is far more history to the Torygraph’s fate – and its bankers – than at first meets the eye. Earlier this month, Lloyds Bank took the unprecedented step of calling in the bailiffs on a £1.2 billion unpaid loan to the Barclay Brothers. This is unfinished business going all the way back to bailouts during the dust-ups of 2008-9: but even that cannot explain the blanket ban on reporting anything of substance about what is clearly a serious fraud of some kind. The Slog digs deeper into this baffling saga.

The Road to Perdition

On retiring in 2000, one of the first things I did was to take a sum I’d been left – some £200,000 – and look for a foolproof term bond from a reliable investment house. The one I settled on was marketed by Scottish Widows, and looked too good to miss….or be true. The basic idea was to give ScotWid the money for nine years, at a minimum growth of 5% guaranteed such that I could withdraw 5% per annum whenever I wanted and at the end of the term get the deposit back come what may. The company was owned by Lloyds Bank, which back then was my chequing bank anyway….and had always served me well – hardly surprising given that some £350,000 was being paid into my account per annum, alongside a final £300,000 in bonuses over the final two years of work.

I had three meetings with a Scotwids “financial adviser” (a term I learned to use should I ever need to vomit reliably) at the Lloyds branch in Lyme Regis….and sent a copy of all the paperwork to my elder brother whose knowledge of financial products was, in those days, pretty close to being metaphysical. Mike rang me back a day or two later and said, “It’s foolproof, our kid, but f**k only knows how they can make money out of it”. I signed up.

Three years later, I decided to get a statement – “online at your fingertips” was still in its infancy back then. I’d withdrawn £30,000 in total as per ‘the rules’. I discovered that the fund held precisely £170,000 – ie, no interest gained and indeed, no sign at all of any investment taking place.

So I went into my local branch and asked to talk to Mr Scotwids, who had signed the paperwork. The next few days turned into a stream of

*I’m afraid he doesn’t work here any more

*Didn’t you get our letter?

*We gave you plenty of notice that the terms of the Bond had been changed

In fact, the Black Horse had not contacted me at all

Bear in mind, this was pre-Meltdown1. I went to the regulatory bodies – chiefly the FSA (Financial Services Authority) – whose input was up there with chocolate teapots and caveat emptor as satisfactory solutions. I withdrew the sum left immediately. The FSA (in my mind, forever after standing for Fraudulent Slickers’ Association) was eventually abolished….on April Fools Day 2013. It’s impossible to ignore the ironic significance of the date.

The Upside to this experience (depending in your viewpoint) was that I quickly realised the extent to which corporate life had protected me from scams….and that what Trump later called The Swamp was horribly real.

Nevertheless, it sent me forth into the emergent online resistance called Blogging. Time passed, and the squeaky-clean image of Lloyds Bank went from murky malfeasance to destructive socio-economic anarchy. The first ten years of my “retirement” taught me – in quadrophonic surround-sound – just how protected I’d been from financialising fiddlers in corporate life. Banks that had been, just thirty years previously, stalwart upstanding institutions keeping the lending liquidity for capitalism on the straight and narrow, had by 2004 completely lost the plot as to where their responsibilities lay.

As Big Bang lumbered on towards Big SNAFU, inside track opinion in the Square Mile already (in private) was fingering Black Beauty as the alltime Ugly Sister of mis-selling. In the following years, the bank was found guilty of mis-selling just about everything: under the stewardship of American Eric Daniels, these included credit insurance, bonds, every type of chequing account and various savings scams – to the point where, by 2017, Lloyds had shelled out some £17.8 billion in fines.

Somewhat late in the day, the Brown-stooge Chancellor Alistair Darling grasped that the PM’s favoured vehicle of rescue in relation to the Halifax/BOScotland (Lloyds) was itself a black hole (thought to be £10billion, but actually over £100billion by the time the worst was over). This was “our greatest ever Chancellor” at work and moving (by now as Prime Minister) in ever more mysterious ways.

Devil Take the Hindmost

Convicted felons jailed as a result were nevertheless thin on the ground, despite the fact that Lloyds had also been at the centre of the Libor scandal. The London Interest rate manipulation scam involved several banks and eventually came to light in 2012. Lloyds was ultimately fined £218Million in 2017, but the main point of novelty in this situation was that a nationalised bank answerable to Whitehall had been involved and yet not a single Sir Humphrey was singled out for being asleep at the wheel, four bonuses were withheld from senior Lloyds executives and eight more were fired. Big Deal.

From my own viewpoint, this also represented a sea change in thinking about banks in general. So massive was the scale of Libor, on first hearing about it I disbelieved that a fraudulent conspiracy of that size was possible. But I was proved wrong – and this came not long after it was assumed that the vast global bailout of two years earlier (it came to a staggering $31 trillion) would now be the banksters’ come-uppance on both sides of the Atlantic. Having dinner one Saturday with business journalist Will Hutton in 2011, he was both livid about banking behaviour and certain that this would be the case. It wasn’t: proposed reforms were diluted and diluted: by 2020 – ready for Operation VaccineCull – it was back to business as usual in the US and the UK.

From 2012 onwards, I realised that bank intra-trading, manipulations of currency values and rigged commodity prices were always going to happen because the bankers no longer felt they owed any responsibility for the success of open market entrepreneurial capitalism (they preferred monopolies) and saw themselves as far bigger and more powerful than any society or nationality.

[Cue ageing footage of the Mad Handbag saying “There’s no such thing as society”]

Appointing a new CEO in 2011 to clean out the Black Horse’s stable – António Mota de Sousa Horta-Osório from Portugal – didn’t help much: a decent man in many ways, he was so overwhelmed by the criminality he found, Horta-Osório promptly succumbed to a nervous breakdown and spent several months in The Priory.

Now you may still be wondering what this has got to do with Lloyds repossessing The Daily Telegraph, but there is method in this bitter history of the average Banker-mogul’s self image, and his/her auto-expectoration at even the thought of ordinary people.

First up and of vital importance, no bank has as much form as Lloyds when it comes to the rip-off of corporate customers. ‘We work hard to keep your business safe from scams’ boasts some existing bumf from the Dark Horse. But the reality of this Google page capture tells a different story:

In investigating the scam at the time – during 2016 – I became more familiar with it’s nature. Put simply, Lloyds (as well as others) lent lots of naive ‘mezzanine’ businesses far more money than they needed on a disguised repayment schedule, and then “repossessed” the business at the first sign of “default” as set out in the loan terms. All assets were seized as part of the repossession, and then resold to a competitor at a handsome profit.

Thinking myself at the time about “The Slog” as a brand identity, I had briefly toyed with the idea of taking out a loan to invest in both soft and hard tech. An Irish friend with expertise in loan security advised me, “Not a bad idea…but don’t touch Lloyds with a bargepole”.

Given my own experiences and investigations in relation to Dark Horses, I felt this to be very sound advice.

Second – of equal importance really – there is a High Wall of silence surrounding the Lloyds v Barclay family case about this allegedly unpaid £1.2 billion loan that is as near as damnit to being a total blackout. We don’t know when the loan was taken out, we don’t know what for, we don’t know whether there was a guarantor beyond Telegraph Media Group, and we don’t know what the “default” definition is. All we know is that – in a unique act of repossession – Lloyds Bank sent the bailiffs in.

The absence of MSM comment is all too familiar; this stinks to high heaven of not just grubby secrets associated with bank bailouts, but also a military intelligence dimension….the dimension that has always followed The Telegraph around like a bad penny.

Finally – with quite astonishingly hypocritical sang-froid, Tory grandees intervened as soon as the repossession was announced .

A week ago, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader and work and pensions secretary, said the potential owners of The Telegraph and its journalism were a matter of public interest. He said: “What is vital in the course of this sale is that the identities of any people trying to buy the paper are made public early on in the process. That matters not just for Conservatives but for all people who respect independent news reporting.”

Clearly, Sir Iain hadn’t read the Telegraph’s weekend ‘Russian coup’ coverage.

Perhaps the same applies to Lord Patten, the former Conservative Party chairman and Governor of Hong Kong, who opined: “The Telegraph has been a really vital part of our media for decades…It’s in the interests of democracy and our public education that the buyers understand the responsibility of owning a great newspaper. We should never forget that evidence-based facts and the transparency demanded by good newspapers are crucial ingredients in every liberal democracy.” And Liam Fox, the former Conservative chairman and defence secretary, said: “Newspapers still wield considerable influence. We therefore require transparency on issues of ownership and therefore editorial control.”

Quite a turnout of wrinkly Conservative Big Beasts wrenting their ermine and gnashing their teeth about a national “institution” that has been (apart from notable exceptions like Allison Pearson) a coven of collaboration with unipolar hegemonists and Covid criminality for the last three years. But the Tory dinosaurs want it both ways: full disclosure of the editorial line of the buyers on the one hand, but zero investigation of why on Earth the Barclay twins needed a loan of £1.2 billion (and got it) on an asset for which they paid only £664million in 2004. Yes, Hell hath no double standards quite like a Tory trying to hide Party loyalty behind the ragged clothes of social responsibility.

Once again, we find ourselves on an expedition to find the relevant cui bono.

Changing the terms to confuse The People

One title enjoying the discomfiture of the Telegraph Media Group is of course The Guardian, but its investigative skills these days are risible. It failed, for instance (as has the post Corbyn Labour Party) to ask one very simple question while the washed-up Lloyds den of iniquity ‘recovered’ to become private again: was the loan to Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee at the Telegraph taken out under Labour or Tory public ownership…or neither?

That question – the Big When Thing – is the key to everything else. Remember: it is an established fact that one fraud at which Lloyds Bank excelled was the lend-silly-foreclose-early model. It was also generally agreed at the time that the Barclay twins overpaid for the Telegraph title. Chances are, like much of old Fleet Street, they underestimated the importance of paid subscriptions for advertisers scrambling to learn the structure and pitfalls of being online as well as printed paper.

An allied question nearly two decades on, however, is Why Now with the bailiffs shtick? I’ve analysed seven different valuations of Telegraph Media Group over the last 72 hours, and none of them come anywhere near the £1.2 billion loan that Lloyds alleges remains unrecovered. The TMG valuations as of tonight 28th June 2023 range from £270million to £640 million.

Of course, anything can happen in an auction at least partly about prestige (observe the Japanese FT takeover price that blew everyone else out of the Park) but that’s not really the point. Lloyds Bank values TMG at £750million (good luck with that one) but even assuming that as a sale outcome, we’re still looking at a loss of half a billion sterling.

I think this to be potentially about a much bigger issue than one loan – however enormous. In the absence of more revelations (should they ever surface) one can’t be definitive. But the purpose of this extended Slogpost essay is not to identify the immediately guilty: it is to establish how much more important geopolitical military aims (backed by banker-tech power) are to any situation going forward than any national or regional purely Party consideration.

Lumbering dinosaurs, take note: what was the military industrial complex in 1958 (when Eisenhower first coined the term) is now the military surveillance Silicon valley tech banker emerging One Global Government update of Mussolini fascism.

Somewhere on another plane of the Time continuum, Musso & Dolfi are pulling each other off in unalloyed joy.

In the meantime, the following archived Slogposts may help you get informed: note in particular the very low levels of interest in the content and comments at the time…

None of this is “wild conspiracy theory”. As the Buddhists say, “Everything is connected”. Keep a close eye on this one: people at the very highest pay level have an interest in protecting Lloyds Bank as representative of a false Truth to which, it seems, we must all pay homage….as indeed others have a motive for keeping the Telegraph Group “doing its job”.

Someone, somehow, somewhere took the decision to repossess The Telegraph, despite Lloyds having £17billion of profitable working income and very little chance of retrieving more than 50% of the loan allegedly in default.

Only a much closer examination of Lloyds Psychos v Barclay Twins is going to open up the can of worms that was sealed in the 2009-2017 epoch. Régime change is clearly an important goal, and this has, after many years, become a tug of war. But why?

Stay tuned.

John Ward’s work on the subject of banking malfeasance and megalomania is in part informed by 17 years of working with financial institutions as clients, and also his own experiences as a victim of mis-selling. He has remained for many years an opponent of Bourse manipulated monopolism in particular and globalism in general.