Why don’t they leave this guy alone? The pension was agreed…end of. The media would have us believe that Fred caused the financial collapse on his own…he did not.
Let him keep the agreed amount (and certainly don’t change the law to take it away as some woman suggested) and move on… And yes, I did lose quite a lot of cash over the recent months…
The issue is that you and I are paying for that extra pension by the amounts of equity we have bought in the bank to prop it up which was then used to buy him his extra pension entitlements. If we had not done so an the bank had collapsed, he, like is probably the case with the high pensioners at Lehman Brothers for example, would have had his pension cut to about £25,000 a year (still a very high pension compared with pensions generall and even compared with median earnings). That £25,000 a year would not even come from the tax payer, but would be paid for from pension schemes that have to buy into the Pension Protection Fund which works like an insurrance scheme.
What the fuss is that the taxpayer is paying, and they are paying for a pension that was discretionary as he could have been given a year’s salary instead which would have been cheaper. Any company not rescued by the Government in thsi way would see its high earning early retirees treated much less generously. (People who have pensions not in the top 1% or so or who are over normal pension age when the company goes bust would get 90-100% of their pension from the scheme).
BTW, he also has another pension from other employment of £37,000 a year so is not hard up compared with most people.
I agree - there are issues about scapegoating (govt. using this guy to draw heat from themselves) and the law shouldn’t be changed to assuage a mob mentality which is looking for a human sacrifice.On the other hand - as a taxpayer - I resent paying this greedy capitalist cnt 14 grand a week - for doing nothing except wrecking a bank - and if he had any class and decency - he would give it up voluntarily. But then he is a selfish greedy capitalist cnt isn’t he - so no chance of that.
Bit of a conundrum isn’t it. 
well the agreement came only 4 months before he left… the government wasn’t informed of this agreement… new owner aka the gov didn’t know anything about this until too late, the tax payers pay for his pension… he woudl have got about £25k if the tax payers did not rescue them, if he was fired he would have got nothing.
He might not be the one that did it but he was one of them… plus his bank forked up… plenty of banks round that didn’t need the tax payers to recue them out…
Need I say more??
P.S. I don’t want him to get anything since doctors, ambulance drivers, police men, fire fighters and so forth put their lives in danger and save lives every day… and they get jack ****. Sorry but I get tired to see fat cats… and I mean all kind of fat cats get more money than they deserve… these include everything from sport players to movie actors, peopel sueing for any crap and getting major payout and so on… the difference between people struggling every day to pay their mortgage and people that don’t know what to do with their money is appauling.
Absolutely - it’s the doctors, health service staff and fire fighters etc that make this society work - yet they (particularly nurses and firemen etc) get shat on by a system which doesn’t pay them enough even to buy a modest flat near where they work - while cynical greedy selfish cnts like Fred Fck get paid hundreds of thousands of pounds for making society effectively a worse place to live in - by increasing inequality and promoting a culture of greed and envy - studies have shown (and they are credible and respected) that modern developed societies with the highest incidence of crime and anti-social behaviour like the U.S. and U.K. also have the most de-regulated free market economies.
But then that’s the way of the world ain’t it.
This was agreed by the government. It’s all very well for them to say ‘we were given to understand…’ and ‘we believed…’. They were the ones pushing for things to happen, so the onus should have been on them to actually read the frikking contracts.
They gave out 20 billion pounds of our money on the basis of handshakes and nods. They gave away 20 billion pounds without actually reading the contracts.
Caveat Emptor, right?
Then they turn around and say that they are above the rule of law in this country? Sure, we’ve seen them abuse people on working visas (HSMP debacle). We’ve seen them ignore European human rights laws about deleting innocent people’s DNA. We’ve seen them ignore findings that certain information should be made available to the public (Iraq memo FOIA action)
And yet despite all this, the cheeky bastards want to blame someone else for their mistakes?
RBS has 14,000 staff, and probably a similar number of ex-staff with pension rights. So who is going to pay the army of lawyers needed to check 25,000 contracts?
The government weren’t asking those 14000 staff to quit. The government were asking that Sir Fred quit.
How, exactly, did he do that? The guy’s a scapegoat and I hope he gets to keep the lot. Why don’t the Government just accept their mistake ?..Some chance of that I should think :)Bet you’d give it up right away if it was your 700K…not! 
He’s just a greedy f*ck.
:D:D:D;)
I’m sorry but if you are going to invest billions in a business spending a few hundred thousand on having contracts checked should be a given…it’s due diligence.
The Government have made a rod for their own back. If they were stupid enough to believe the shysters that they were bailing out, and funnily enough the pension details were in the annual reports for 2007, tough sh!t.
Gotta say i agree here. Unbelievable incompetence.
Government? I wouldn’t trust them to run the fuggin tea club.
And despite the failings of the government no one is questioning the fat pensions that MPs get, nor is the issue of civil servants final salary pension being questioned.
Pot, kettle, black?
Civil Service pensions, don’t get me started! Oh you have! The average civil service pension is about £5,000 a year and the average civil servant earns about £18,000 a year so even if they work the full 40 years for you they only get a pension of £9,000 a year. I presume you live on more than that? That was the old scheme. Current new recruits have to contribute to their pensions and earn a lower pension than under the classic scheme.
No civil servants, or MPs can earn anything like a £700,000 a year pension at 50 after just ten years service like Sir Fred did.
Leave Fred alone…he has done nothing wrong apart from sitting in the drivers seat when the truck hit…
Sounds like a few here would have refused the pension if they had been offered it?? I think not.
Good luck to him I say:)
