Trust in a market where it pays to deceive?

Martin Vander Weyer’s Any Other Business

I can’t claim to have invented the off-balance-sheet sleight-of-hand used by the Greek government, under the guidance of Goldman Sachs, to beggar itself so spectacularly. But I was certainly a pioneer in the field. Long ago, at Barclays, I devised a scheme to help a famous brewery (now, needless to say, a ‘hotel and leisure group’ operating under a different name) to deceive investors and analysts into believing its debts were smaller than they really were. My handiwork en-abled the brewer to borrow a seven-figure sum in order to lend smaller parcels of cash to its tied pubs — but through a special company that did not have to be consolidated in the brewery’s published accounts, which gave no indication of the liability involved.

Elegant when sketched as a diagram and just the kind of financial fashion access-ory big companies expected to be offered by bankers in those days, it became such a Heath Robinson contraption by the time expensive City lawyers had drawn up the contracts that I’m not sure it was ever used to fund so much as a new dartboard for some long-since-demolished Rover’s Return.

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Gus Carter

Pensioners, it’s your turn to cough up

But it was nevertheless a forebear of the exercise by which, according to reports this week, the mighty Goldman Sachs managed billions of dollars worth of bond sales for Greece after arranging large-scale swap transactions that enabled the Greek treasury to disguise the true extent of its fiscal deficit.