THE LESS THAN ODD CASES OF SEPP BLATTER, TIM CARTLEDGE & JEROEN DIJSSELBLOEM

Football News

The horribly nasty, depraved and all-round bung recipient Sepp Blatter of FIFA now fears for his freedom should he ever set foot on US soil again. And his fears are not paranoia.

News of the more than three-year-old FBI investigation into FIFA corruption broke last November.

The investigation centres on corruption allegations about the venue choices for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup tournaments to Russia and Qatar. FIFA conducted its own report on the bids last year: it was never made public, which suggests that even FIFA itself couldn’t find a way to declare Blatter innocent. The chief investigator, American lawyer Michael Garcia, later resigned to protest FIFA’s decision not to release the 350-page report in full.

Compare and contrast this obscene pavane with the mutualist and entirely above board why in which Manchester United rebels FCUM have toiled honestly these ten years or more to produce a footie club owned by the fans. This year, the club has won pretty much every competition it entered: next season, it will be in the Conference League…theoretically just six years away from playing Champions’ League football.

So right up your jacksie Rupert Murdoch, Glaser Family, Milt Friedman, Theodore Levitt, Daniel Hannan and all the other blind followers of the munnneeeee.

Banking News

Barclays’ most prominent foreign-currency-exchange executive Tim Cartledge has resigned rather suddenly ‘to take time out from the business’. But his abrupt departure has Barclays insiders wondering why a key player no longer works there.

Perhaps it is all part of CEO Anthony Jenkins’ rigorous policy of settling outstanding investigations into past misconduct, in order to reigorously stop them ever happening again by being rigorously accusatory.

“I expect we will make significant, though sometimes difficult, progress in these issues in 2015,” he told the bank’s annual meeting, referring to issues including an ongoing investigation into alleged foreign exchange manipulation.

Cartledge was previously the head of the Barclays electronic currency trading (FX) platform Barx based in Singapore.

Just fancy that.

EU News

After months of preaching to Greek politicians on the subject of corruption, Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem faces a Parliamentary enquiry into his handling of the bailed out ABN Amro Group NV, owned by the Netherlands State.

The Dutch parliament is debating the matter after MPs became furious about pay rises awarded to ABN Amro executives….so outrageous in fact, the Government was forced to delay the bank’s flotation.

At one and the same time, Dijsselbloem promised ABN Amro top management that he would defend their increases, while telling the media he thought the pay hikes were unwise. Many and varied are the number of faces the Dutch finance minister has; we mere mortals marvel at how he mixes parsimony with sanctimony when it comes to his Greek and banker dealings. Respectively.

Earlier at The Slog: Why Cameron’s bid to be a Tartan Toff will fail