THE EVENT was booked six months ago, but FSA chief executive Hector Sants, right, cannot be looking forward to his heavy date with 200 or so leaders of the capital's financial community, guests of the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, at Prestonfield House on Wednesday. As a man in the eye of the storm, who presided over a now widely-discredited supervisory regime, he might even be tempted to make his excuses and absent himself, but Edinburgh business people mutter that this would be seen as a serious black mark.
According to Graham Birse, deputy director of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, Sants is likely to be pressed on the future shape of the regulatory framework and whether it is fit for purpose, and how the "pendulum" can be prevented from swinging back from insufficient or ineffective regulation to something just as damaging in the opposite direction.
Says Birse: "It would be unrealistic to see the regulatory pendulum staying where it was, but we will want to hear from the FSA about executive pay and bonuses, which they are said to be working on right now. What we would say about that is that while everyone has been surprised and to some extent unhappy at the sums of money handed out to bosses presiding over disaster, we would hope and expect the FSA to distinguish between salaries and bonuses. What we are most concerned with is rewards for failure and we expect the FSA to make clear that these handsome bonus payments will be curtailed."
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HOW MUCH did last week's train strike cost the Scottish economy? There seems to be a strange lack of interest in this question, presumably because it "only" lasted 24 hours and people have other matters to worry about.
In terms of lost productivity, alternative travel arrangements etc, multiplied by 100,000 or so train-users, it must be in several millions (the Daily Mail said
£15 million, but didn't source this figure). The higher cost is to the prestige of the trade union movement, which did little to explain why a relatively trivial matter of hypothetical cases of rescheduling safety training - proxy for the RMT and Network Rail's generally bad mutual relations - was worth the severe punishment of the great Scottish public. The STUC - which has strong views about most matters affecting the Scottish economy - has been uncharacteristically quiet on this strike, but when pressed a spokeswoman defended its affiliate member on the basis that "most" of the strike's victims, standing on deserted platforms or stuck in traffic jams, "understand" the need to be messed around to defend the principle of collective bargaining in the workplace. Agenda suggests the STUC commissions a poll of the Scottish public to settle that question.
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TO AN excellent launch at the New Club for STV journalist David Torrance's acclaimed biography of George Younger, held, as fate would have it, on the day that the banks' rescue package had been introduced largely in reaction to the plummeting shares in Lord Younger's beloved RBS (he was chairman from 1991 to 2001).
In his speech, Lord Sanderson of Bowden pointed out how Younger would have wanted the event to be fun, and it was; an advertisement for Scots' ability to find things to celebrate even in tough times.
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