Do the main stream media tell you these things. If only. Private Eye is as near as it gets to honest journalism in this foul year of Our Lord. See PE 1256/29 for the full story.
Even if you assume that
Her Majesty's Government is not
corrupt it is stitching up the workers, the lower paid, us not them. When they
set up a deal and put in men with a known track record of incompetence if not
worse you know we are being robbed again. Once the new boss gets in he can bring
his old mates from other failed operations. And, if, in a few years if they take on
some ex-politicians whose snouts have been dragged out of one trough and want
another it will be done purely on merit. It will not be post dated bribes.
Do the main stream media tell you these things. If only. Private Eye is as near
as it gets to honest journalism in this foul year of Our Lord. See PE 1256/29
for the full story.
MORE on the old mates' club that is the Personal Accounts Delivery Authority (PADA), the government body charged, from 2012, with automatically enrolling millions of modestly paid employees in a stock market based pension scheme called the National Employment Savings Trust ("Nest").
As the overall stock market decline over the last decade shows, saving in this way is risky (even on optimistic official forecasts, hundreds of thousands of people will lose money). Even so, the authority's choice of investment director, Mark Fawcett, is an interesting one, to say the least, given his background in the volatile world of hedge funds. Since joining the authority Fawcett (pictured) has said that "hedge funds will. .. have a place in Nest)". (Doubtless millions of low-earners' savings will be a welcome source of new cash for Britain's struggling hedgies).
Before joining the pensions authority Fawcett specialised in Japanese investments at Thames River Capital, a Mayfair hedge fund. But following a lean spell, in October 2008 Thames River closed its Japan fund and made Fawcett redundant, at which point, he told an FT supplement last year, "I was looking for something to do".
How fortunate that the top government investment job should immediately crop up. And how coincidental, the Eye can reveal, that Fawcett was a close friend, indeed had been the best man, of one Simon Richards, the pension authority's £207,000-a-year "business delivery director" and right hand man of chief executive Tim Jones.
PADA acknowledges that Richards "introduced" Fawcett but says that he "did not interview Mr Fawcett or influence the recruitment process". Oddly, a spokeswoman tells the Eye that the job was advertised in the press "from 16 October for one month". But Fawcett claims to have "joined PADA in October 2008", which would have made the public advert a sham and appears to confirm a shoo-in contravening the principles of public appointments.
As revealed in Eye 1254, this isn't the only friendly connection in the well-feathered Nest. Richards was himself brought in by Jones after they worked together at a company called Simpay while Richards also brought in a number of his former colleagues, including Nick Sex, from the consulting firm he subsequently ran, Alpheus Consulting. Now it emerges that yet another Alpheus man, Adrian Boniface, has been on the books. Accounts for the personal services company through which he tax-efficiently provided his services, E&C Consulting Ltd. suggest his wages were approaching Richards.
The ex-Alpheus men at the pensions authority; have already awarded a consultancy contract to Alpheus; but the Eye's freedom of information requests for the amount of payments to this and other suppliers have been refused, even though every other public body provides such information. Which makes PADA uniquely secretive as well as uniquely clubby. At least it's only millions of people's retirement incomes being entrusted to it. PS: The Nest scheme demands that employers contribute 3 percent of their employees' salaries, with staff themselves putting in a further 4 percent (on which they get tax relief, taking the total contribution to around 8 percent). The personal accounts delivery authority's staff, by contrast, have 8 percent of their salary paid into a pension fund entirely by their more generous employer - the taxpayer!