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Saturday 19 July 2008

Any Other Business

These days, Vesco the fugitive fraudster would have had a top job on Wall Street

So farewell, Robert Vesco, the fraudster, drug trafficker and fugitive from US justice whose death last year has been ‘confirmed by Cuban burial records’, according to the Daily Telegraph. Vesco absconded with $200 million of other people’s money — $60 million of it in banknotes in his excess baggage on a commercial flight — after looting Investor Overseas Services, the mutual-funds empire created but recklessly mismanaged by Bernie Cornfeld. Welcomed as a white knight when he gained control of IOS in 1970, Vesco proceeded to steal most of its remaining assets by selling them to fictitious companies as fast as he could print imaginative new letterheads. He referred to one of these companies as LPI — explaining, when asked, that it stood for Looting and Plundering International.

Vesco’s yacht, the 137ft Patricia III — which he arranged to have spirited away from US Customs in Florida after it had been confiscated — became a familiar sight in Caribbean havens where his money bought him protection. He settled in Cuba to become ‘de facto minister of corruption’, as one US politician described him, but eventually the Castro regime turned against him and jailed him for his part in a cancer-cure scam in which one of his partners was Richard Nixon’s brother Donald. The moustachioed Errol Flynn lookalike of the 1970s was a dishevelled figure by the time of his trial in 1995, but still it’s tempting to say they don’t make rogues like Vesco any more. The trouble is that they probably do, and his ilk today are not holed up in Havana but holding down senior jobs on Wall Street.

The principal of a famous seat of learning draws my attention to a speech by John Denham, secretary of state for Innovation, Universities and Skills, to the Higher Education Funding Council for England conference at Warwick University last month. It was devoted to Labour’s target of university education for 50 per cent of all young people. ‘To succeed in the increasingly competitive global economy, we must unlock the talents of all our people,’ he declaimed. But my informant points out that the minister did not once mention the importance of achieving standards of excellence that might truly enable our colleges and universities, and ultimately our economy, to be globally competitive. Nor did he mention other possible ways of unlocking talent — through trade apprenticeships, armed-services training or business start-up schemes, for example — rather than consigning recalcitrant teenagers to ‘uni’, where they load themselves with debt while coasting through courses that offer neither life-skills nor career prospects. The 50 per cent policy is, at bottom, a mix of class warfare and vote-buying: Denham quoted a survey suggesting that 91 per cent of parents and grandparents want their children to go to university, which he calls ‘a fair deal for their kids’. So never mind the excellence, feel the width of the intake. The speech reminded me of what James Delingpole said in How To Be Right: ‘It’s easy to tell whether or not someone has had an education. If they have, they call it university; if they haven’t they call it “uni”.’

More articles from: Martin Vander Weyer | this section

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