Goodwin's pension
Otherwise known as how to redirect the hate.
Here's the apparent story -
The government want a change of management at RBS.
Sir Goodwin agrees to early retirement and negotiates what he'll receive.
The RBS board 'gives the impression' that the pension is mandatory, contractually obligated.
Sir Goodwin retires and gets pension.
The government discovers that the pension was in fact discretionary and now wants it or some of it to be returned.
Yeah sorry exactly whose fault is this? Easy that'd be the government or in specific the Treasury officials who it seems relied on the RBS board to tell them the terms of the contract rather than read the bloody thing themselves.
Of course this lack of interest in such things comes as no surprise to those of us who watch projects balloon in price as per the allowed terms of government contracts; what is interesting is the way that the government in general is dodging a good percentage of the flak for essentially not doing their jobs.
This is also made highly enjoyable (if that's the right word) by said officials trying to claw back this money on the grounds of 'not rewarding failure' while sitting atop their own gold-plated pensions that they'll still receive regardless of their own actions.
4 comments:
Ah yes, the ancient art of making it look like somebody else is the bad guy.
Somewhat similar to how ISPs want to charge the BBC because it's iPlayer is eating up all their bandwidth and they're going to have to upgrade their networks to cope. Which, clearly, makes it look like this is all the BBC's “fault”.
The truth of the matter, of course, is that ISPs have got used to being able to sell 10× the bandwidth they actually have because most customers only use about 10% of what they pay for. But now along comes iPlayer, and suddenly people are trying to use all of what they paid for. This isn't very profitable for the ISPs, and so now they want to charge somebody. Cute.
Trouble with the ISP situation is that it's all 'virtual'.
For Hire 250 sq ft room [small print 50:1 contention ratio]
Hire that room then find you're crammed into a corner of it because it's also been hired out to 50 other groups at the same time. You'd probably be a bit miffed, yet that's exactly what the ISPs are doing and because you can't see it, it can be blamed on all sorts of things.
Nice illustration.
Now how about the fact that my ISP secretly throttles BitTorrent traffic?
I guess that would be like the 250 sq ft room you've hired secretly squishing all the people wearing green socks into one corner for no apparent reason. Except, obviously, that's impossible! :-P
More like forcing all those who smoke into one small sealed section, which no-one else objects to because smoking is bad and the room hire people are just looking out for everyone else.
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