Peter Sutherland: Vampire Squid?

national | anti-capitalism | other press

Sunday October 17, 2010 23:27

by Marcus McSpartacus

Are Irish Taxpayers About To Bail Out Goldman?

Is Peter Sutherland Stealing From His Own People To Give To The Vampire Squid?

From Zero Hedge:
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/are-irish-taxpayers-ab...e-vam

With the recent nationalization of half of the country's six big banks, and the blanket guarantee over the rest of them, the Irish government has effectively made sure that bondholders in all banks, even those which such as long insolvent Anglo Irish bank will be made whole by the long-suffering Irish taxpayers...
Yet what is amusing is that in between the cracks of exclusively European-bank based senior and subordinated bondholders in such bankrupt banks as Anglo-Irish, a familiar name emerges: Goldman Sachs...
Guido Fawkes, who managed to obtain the Anglo Irish bondholder list, shares the following commentary:

Anglo-Irish Bank did not represent a systemic risk to the Irish economy, it wasn’t a high street bank like AIB or the Bank of Ireland. If it had been allowed to go the way of Lehmans the only losers would have been shareholders and bondholders. The Irish state stepped in and nationalised a bank that was basically run by crooks lending to property speculators. The Irish people are taking losses that should rightly have been shouldered by bondholders.

Every child in Ireland is being bequeathed a huge debt at birth to protect the interests of foreign, mainly German, bondholders – why? Guido was once a bond trader, it was always understood that sometimes the bond issuer defaults. That is the risk investors take.

So why is Dublin’s political establishment so keen to protect foreign investors at the expense of future generations? Guido has obtained the list of foreign Anglo-Irish bondholders as at the close of business tonight. These are the people whom Dublin’s politicians really seem to care about.

Between them they hold Anglo-Irish bonds with a face-value of €4,034,756,880. Shouldn’t they take the hit rather than future generations of Irish taxpayers? Capitalism is a system of profit and loss, they took the risk of investing in Anglo-Irish Bank. Is the Irish government under pressure from the European Central Bank in Frankfurt to protect German investors?

...we would like to add Goldman Sachs to the list of bailoutees. Surely, few firms in the world deserve to be redeemed as much as god's little helpers...

Little else that can be added here... except for this amusing anecdote of another Goldman Sachs International Chairman, one Peter Sutherland, former Ireland attorney general and EU commissioner who just so happens was a chairman of British Petroleum (remember those guys?) previously. To wit from the Irish Times:

[Sutherland] and [recently heckled] Lenihan have remained in contact through the financial crisis. On one occasion, Sutherland visited Lenihan to tell him what a great job he thought he was doing and to say that Lenihan had the potential to be one of the great taoisigh of the 21st century. Lenihan was taken aback, he says.

Surely, this great son of Ireland, who obviously has Lenihan in his back pocket, is in active negotiation on behalf of his current employer, Goldman Sachs. Yet something tells us Mr. Sutherland will be the last person to share light on Goldman's twilight relationship vis-a-vis the Irish government...

Lack of revisionism is not too surprising coming from a person whose personal, and future, fortune, is based on the past generosity of American, and now Irish taxpayers. Because his wealth is certainly not due to his skill at anything related to his actual career:

Sutherland was also a board member at Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) during the financial meltdown when the UK bank collapsed into state arms after a frenetic, debt-fuelled growth. Of the bank’s 2007 role in the €71 billion acquisition of Dutch bank ABN Amro, the biggest ever banking takeover, Sutherland says it made “the mistake of buying at precisely the wrong time when the world was falling off the back of a bus”.

Perhaps instead of driving trucks full of cement into Parliament, Irish taxpayers can be a little more proactive, and ask one of their most respected "leaders" just on whose behalf he is working on in this latest bailout, which could easily be Ireland's last.