So we were not paying our bankers too much!!!
Latin dance anyone?
© Am Ang Zhang 2010
HSBC Holdings Plc banker Mimi Monica Wong won a Hong Kong lawsuit seeking the return of HK$60 million ($7.7 million) in fees she paid for Latin dance lessons.
``They took her money, for services in the future which she would never take up,'' Deputy High Court Judge Gerard Muttrie said in a 59-page written judgment today.
Wong had sued her Latin dance teachers Mirko Saccani and his wife Gaynor Fairweather for the return of the fees, part of a HK$120 million advance payment.
He humiliated Wong in front of others at a practice session in August 2004. Media reports of the case made the 61-year-old head of HSBC's private banking unit in Asia a household name in the city.
Saccani, 31, admitted swearing and screaming at Wong at the practice session in Hong Kong's Li Hua Restaurant, and calling her a ``lazy cow'' to motivate her, according to the judgment.
Stuart Gulliver, the CEO at HSBC, saved £30m or so by getting rid of 700 workers. In 2010, Mr Gulliver pocketed £6.1m in salary and deferred bonuses.
When you point out to people in the City that the old market justifications for their salaries no longer make sense, and they are failures sustained by other people's money, they are astonished. "Look at my beautiful new house, my beautiful new car, my beautiful new wife, I'm not a loser." Indeed not.
The losers are the millions who had to subsidise them. For all the valid criticism of the current Labour leadership, surely there must be scope for an intelligent centre-left to take aim at the undeserving rich and turn anger against a calamitous and unrepentant elite into a movement for social change?
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