The Financial Services Authority is in serious danger of becoming a laughing stock. That’s assuming it isn’t one already. After unprecedented criticism at its lack of governance over the past months it’s now organising another swan this coming Thursday.
It’s holding a seminar at the posh Balmoral hotel in Edinburgh which is one of the most luxurious five-star establishments anywhere north of Watford.
The seminar’s about the changes in the way retail investment products are sold. If you really want to go it’ll cost you £172.50. It’s half that if you’re from a little company. How thoughtful of the FSA to remember the little man who has been so harmed by the Crash which he foolishly thought the FSA might have warned him about.
No doubt hard-pressed small company businessmen will have better things to spend their money on. A more appropriate setting for the seminar in these difficult times would have been a cave warmed by a peat fire stuck out somewhere on the Scottish moors.
Seminars, conventions, corporate hospitality days at Newmarket and Henley and Wimbledon, executives climbing rock faces and fording rivers in bonding sessions, and all the other diverse knees-ups which were so popular in boom times are tipped to take an enormous clout as the recession deepens. There have been a few casualties. Expect more.
Incidentally, what happened to Red Letter Days? It was a little company founded by a woman member of the Dragons Den team on TV. It used to put people in racing cars for a birthday treat or send bored bosses up in balloons. But then it ran into problems and was bought out by two other Dragons, Peter somebody or other and the bloke with a Greek sounding name who runs knicker shops. The woman disappeared from the show.
So did the Dragons save Red Letter? Or did it go bust? What happened to the woman who founded it? We have a right to know.
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