NIGELLA LAWSON - A £100.000 A MONTH CREDIT CARD

PPI

Banks have been putting it about in the media that most people have now claimed their PPI refunds. Financial experts think this is the banks way of telling customers “Come on, it time to put this all behind us and move on”.

Despite the banking world saying this the HSBC Group have put aside a further £95m into the mis-selling pot. It’s thought that this might just be enough to repay Nigella Lawson over the PPI she had on the HSBC credit card she spent £100.000 on every month for ten years. On that very subject it’s been alleged in the court at the fraud trial of her two former assistants/personal shoppers that Miss Lawson has a class A drug habit. As yet no word from Nigella who might claim that it’s a misunderstanding. Yes she did allegedly say I love  Charlie, but the Charlie she loves is her husband Charlie Satchi. Not anymore obviously as they are now divorced after he took her for a slap up meal.

In total HSBC which includes First Direct and M&S Bank have put aside £1.8b. How busy were HSBC and its cohorts, they must have been stitching up customer during normal office hours, and in the evening and at double on Saturdays and at treble times on Sundays.

Even though HSBC admits mis-selling PPI the Financial Ombudsman Service in September showed that HSBC  wrongly dismissed or didn’t pay adequate redress in 37% of the claims in the first six months of the year.

Seems they hoped that the 37% of people they wrongly dismissed or didn’t adequately redress would simply accept the banks “Dear Sir/Madam, you are due nothing, or £10, so come on let’s put this all behind us and move on, Love HSBC” letter.

But the 37% of people didn’t accept this and they wrote to the FOS saying “Dear Sir/Madam, HSBC thinks I’m stupid”.

However HSBC aren’t the worst. Of the top 10 of most complained about financial firms Lloyds TSB and Bank of Scotland, both part of Lloyds Banking Group were number one and number two. Lloyds TSB wrongly rejected 86% of claims while Bank of Scotland wrongly rejected 80%. The FOS found that the 14% and 20% respectively of claims those banks paid out were the direct result of the claimant visiting them with a baseball bat and an angry look on their face.

Therefore both Lloyds TSB and BOS  have adopted the HSBC “hope they give up” ethos but they’ve taken it to the extreme.

And the situation seems to be getting worse for PPI claimants as the Ombudsman dealt with a 327,035 cases from January until June this year, up 15% on the previous six months. As the Ombudsman is indeed an ombudsman singular, the poor man’s workload has him exhausted.

90% of the complaints made against Lloyds TSB to the ombudsman were upheld proving that they were indeed stalling and had naughty sneaky monkeys dealing with the claims.

Lloyds TSB’s claims department apparently works on a similar principle to the theory that if you have an infinite amount of monkeys and an infinite amount of typewriters and an infinite amount of time, eventually the monkeys will type out the entire works of Shakespeare. Lloyds TSB appear to have an infinite amount of monkeys and an infinite amount of claims and given that they also appear to have an infinite amount of time, eventually they will wrongly dismiss all claims.

This is where Consumer Kings comes in; we don’t accept being fobbed off by the banana chompers. So claim with us.

You would have thought that the banks would be trying to rebuild trust and you could say that at least RBS are trying harder than most. They have upheld 68% of PPI claims. That could be that the bank wants to get most of their PPI cases with an average pay out of £1,736 out of the way to retrain the staff who work in their redress department to deal with claims from their small business customers who had their businesses closed down and their assets stolen by RBS.  I say deal with, I do of course mean reject because £1,736 will be chicken feed compared to what the average pay out will be from the “they destroyed my life” claimants.

RBS which is state owned have just announced losses of £634m for the last quarter. And here’s the funny thing. RBS announced they are creating an internal “bad bank” to deal with the £38b of problem loans. A bad bank?, everyone thought RBS was the bad bank. Perhaps RBS should have announced that they were setting up an internal “much worse bank”.

So are the PPI claims winding down?. The banks say yes but they then contradict themselves by putting further millions aside. £750m as in the case of Lloyds TSB.

Therefore there is a lot of money just waiting to be claimed.

www.consumerkings.co.uk

BIG BREASTS XMAS TURKEY, AND MOBILES IN THE AIR

PETA

The animal rights group Peta claim Xmas turkeys are being bred to have such large breasts that they are dying from heart attacks.  A spokesman for Bernard Mathews said “Well, given the choice I think I’d rather die from a heart attack than die from being hung upside down, electrocuted and decapitated”

MOBILES

Airlines are reconsidering the ban on mobile phone use. Easyjet say that come March they will allow passengers to make calls whilst airborne, but as they don’t want fellow passengers annoyed they’ll insist that anyone making a call steps outside to do so. It’s not thought that Ryanair will follow suit and allow passengers to use their own phones as Michael O’Leary has just had all this aircrafts toilets removed and replaced with phone boxes. That’s his latest money sucking scheme. 

Even when one of his aircraft is in trouble the pilot will have to pay a £1 to call 999 to alert the airport fire crews to prepare for a crash landing.

SCOTLANDS “WHITE PAPER”

The Scottish Government launched its 650 page White Paper on Scottish independence.  The book because it is a book, a very big book serves two functions. The first being listing all the things that Scotland will do if the Scots vote yes, and the other function involves the fact that the White Paper is produced using camomile infused soft but very strong paper, courtesy of Andrex. Alex Salmond would have gone the whole hog and printed his White Paper on lovely fluffy Labrador puppies but they tend to be a bit wriggly and hard to read.

Scotland’s first minister still insists he will be keeping the pound. His whole argument being “Scotland will keep using the £1 because I say it will”.

It is thought that there will be a no vote because 70% of those who plan to vote no quite like getting free prescriptions, free education and £738 spent on them per head when people in England, Wales and Ireland have 70p spent on them per head.

The SNP’s generous spending promises are all based on oil. This is despite experts in the oil industry stating categorically that it’s running out.

Not true according to Scotland’s First Minister who said that research that he’s made up proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Scotland has plenty of oil. Yes, but most of it is in the deep fryers in Scotland’s thousands and thousands of chip shops.

Not true again claims Mr Salmond. He told a press conference “Think of the biggest number in the world, double it, and that’s a just tiny amount of the oil Scotland has got left in the North Sea”.

It was noted that his Deputy Nicola Sturgeon had dolled herself for the occasion. Jacket by Zara, skirt by Karen Millen, shoes by Russell and Bromley and make up by Homebase’s household paints aisle.

PAY DAY LOANS CAP

PAY DAY LOAN CAP.

The government is to introduce a new law to cap the cost of payday loans. The cap as yet hasn’t been set, but it’s thought that the government will set it just below “taking the p*ss”.

This can’t come quick enough for Ed Miliband who’s been campaigning against the enormous cost involved in taking out a payday loan. The reason that Ed has went all evangelical on this issue is because Labour and Ed Balls are going to have to borrow £1.2m and £50k respectively from Wonga to repay what they morally and financially owe the Co-operative Bank. And they’d rather borrow at a lower rate obviously because they don’t want to get into power (if they ever do) and find No 10 being repossessed from under them because they can’t maintain the £12.50 weekly payments.

Australia has already gone down the rate capping route with a maximum 20% upfront fee and an interest rate limit of 4% a month.

However, penalties for late payment are allowed to be  twice as much as the loan amount.

The Australians have also introduced a breathalyser test for loan applicants because applicants should really be sober enough to realise what they are getting themselves into. And they must take a kangaroo with them who will explain “what’s that Skip, this pay day loan company can fine me twice as much as the loan if I miss a payment………………and Timmy’s fallen down a well”.

 

If that (apart from the breathalyser and the kangaroo thing) happens here the sneaky payday loan lenders that every payment is late. This will easily be achieved by tiny, tiny, tiny writing in the contract that legally states that lenders use the Julien calendar whereas borrowers and the rest of the world use the Gregorian calendar. In other words every payment will be late because they’ll be due on a date on the Julien calendar that no longer actually exist.

Days like the 30^th of February and March 35^th.

There are also plans afoot to give local council’s planning departments the powers to restrict the number of loan shops in the High Street. In some towns the entire length of the street is loan shops, and a Greggs. In more affluent areas the streets are loan shops, a Greggs and a bookies. And let’s be honest here the pay day lender are taking it too far when they’ve all got a Santa’s Grotto for Xmas with a Santa who asks “and how much of a loan would you like for Xmas little boy”

 

On that very theme Miliband has also said payday lenders should be banned from advertising on children’s TV. His angle is that today payday loan ads, tomorrow pocket money day ads. Whereby kids will able to borrow money to see them through till next pocket money day, because they blew all their previous pocket money on Moshi Monsters, sweets and cigarettes and alcohol.

Lenders such as Wonga and Quickquid claim they wouldn’t lend money to children because that would be immoral and ridiculous. Unless of course they had a Nintendo Wii or an Xbox to put up as collateral.

They also said they have strict procedures in place to assure that they don’t lend money to people who have no means of paying it back.

The strict procedures are searching questions such as; what is your name, and what is your address, and only then if the prospective borrower can answer both questions, or one of them, or none of them will they qualify for a pay day loan.

An interesting footnote is that Wonga insists they have a customer satisfaction rating of 91%.

And that’s the first time Wonga and 91% have ever appeared in the same sentence.

Wonga and 5000% lots of time. Wonga and 91%, never, until now.

The RBSFELLAS, THE AMAZON BURMA RAILWAY AND £1 FOR PRESTWICK AIRPORT.

Amazon.

The  BBC’s Panorama programme sent an undercover reporter into an Amazon warehouse in Swansea to investigate the company’s treatment of its staff. The programme discovered conditions a stress expert said could cause mental and physical illness. Secret filming found that a night workers shift involved on average 11 miles of walking and a worker has 33 seconds to collect an order. Even is that order is at the other end of the 800,000 square foot premises.

This probably explains why Amazon pump their staff full of steroids and amphetamine sulphate because it’s the only way they could possibly fulfil their 33 seconds per parcel contract. That or be Usain Bolt, on steroids and amphetamine sulphate.

One every 33 seconds is coincidentally is the exact same rate Welsh soldiers at Rourkes Drift had to shoot a Zulu to ensure they weren’t overrun.

Perhaps that’s why Amazon picked the 33 seconds time span.

Amazon will be employing 15,000 extra staff in the run up to Xmas and Amazon say that the safety of its employees is its number one priority. But how save can the 1000’s of regular staff and the  15,000 extra staff scattering at high speed in all directions carrying books, CD’s an fridges possibly be. There are bound to be collisions, pile ups.

On the upside for the Welsh staff the Amazon Swansea warehouse must have one hell of an enormous male voice choir, or thousands of small ones, because whenever Welshmen gather together in groups of more than three they form a choir. Despite being under fire by the Zulu the Welsh regiment holding Rourke’s Drift still managed to form a choir in-between attacks to sing Men of Harlech at the Zulus.

But is walking 11 miles and handling hundreds of packages per shift all that unusual. Not really, postmen do, as do drug dealers at the Nottinghill Carnival.

In a statement Amazon said “the night shift is lawful”. They also said they sought advice to ensure that they “comply with all the legal requirements”.

That’s almost exactly what they said about not really paying very much tax all. It was just that the legal requirements thanks to loopholes left them managing to comply by just paying £10.

 

 

 

RBS

The Royal Bank of Scotland stand accused of lending businesses money, then waiting until the money was spent and immediately demanding it back. And when the company can’t pay it back immediately RBS immediately seize the company’s assets immediately. That’s the kind of behaviour you’d expect from a loan shark who goes by the name Vinnie, but not from a so called reputable financial institution. This latest accusation means that RBS have now been accused of everything except murder, but it’ll probably be just a matter of time before the City Regulators find themselves looking into the mysterious disappearances of borrowers who got on the wrong of the bank by not having any assets to seize.

Talking of Vinnies, the Business Secretary Vinnie Cable said that the evidence compiled by government adviser Lawrence Tomlinson looks solid, but RBS claims that it is already committed to an investigation into the treatment of customers. RBS refused to be drawn on whether or the investigation will include digging up Fred Goodwin’s basement in a hunt for hundreds of missing customers. Having bodies buried in your basement seems to be a Fred thing, as evidenced by Goodwin’s fellow Fred who went by the name of West. What happened to him? Rumour has it that he owed RBS money.

If the allegations that the bank conspired to close down companies to steal their assets are proven to true the RBS won’t just be responsible for  lost business, they’ll also be responsible for the ex business owners losing their homes too as a  direct result of owing RBS money. Homes they were paying a fiddled Libor rate of interest for on their mortgages. At least the Mafia is upfront about their dodgy activities.

The story will continue………….

 

 

 

£1 Airport.

 

Prestwick Airport has passed into public ownership for the princely sum of £1. Such a bargain price that the Sultan of Brunei could have afforded to buy at least three Prestwick Airports. Seems the airport hasn’t been that busy of late. In fact it’s so quiet that they reported a near miss last week to the Civil Aviation Authority because two planes came within three days of each other. In Prestwick terms that’s almost a mid air collision.

So what went wrong? Bad marketing probably because the airport is in Prestwick in Ayrshire, slap bang right in the middle of Burns country. Rabbie Burns who is Scotland’s national poet and whose fame is worldwide lived in Ayrshire all his life. And did the airport capitalise on that fact by erecting a statue to Burns in the check in hall. No, they erected a statue of Elvis Presley, a man who didn’t live in Ayrshire for any of his life. His only connection with the airport is that he stopped off for two minutes at the airport to use their urinals on his way back from Germany to the US. That was one bad marketing decision; the other was to give the airport the slogan Pure Dead Brilliant. It never seemed to occur to the airports management that in the event of plane crash TV reporters would be reporting on the tragedy with Pure Dead Brilliant in shot in the background. Perhaps then it might have occurred to that “You know, in hindsight maybe Pure Dead Brilliant wasn’t the best idea for a slogan”.

You think?

The slogan came from the catchphrase of a character in the 80’s BBC Scotland sit com City Lights.  I wonder if they had an 80’s catchphrase short list and could have gone with:

 

This time next year Prestwick Airport - Rodney we’ll be millionaires, or

Prestwick Airport -Mrs Slocums Pussy, or

Prestwick Airport - Listen I will say this only once, or

Prestwick Airport – Hi De Hi Campers.

Another reason the airport is so quiet is that the routes it serves. After all how many people want to fly from Prestwick to Baffin Island or from Prestwick to whatever the capital of Greenland is or from Prestwick to……

No that’s it. It only has two routes.

The question is, how will the Scottish Government who now own the airport make it a viable business prospect, or will it end up costing the taxpayer millions?. The First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond said “People are worried about a government wasting taxpayer’s money, that’s just adorable”.

Having said that the Scottish Government could use the aircraft hangers for storage place to house all the billions and billions and billions of a new Scottish currency featuring Alex Salmonds face on. The currency Mr Salmond was planning to introduce if Scotland voted “Yes” in the independence referendum.

Something the Scots won’t do.  

 

A LOAD OF BALLS AND OFGEMS DEMANDS

A LOAD OF BALLS

Ed Balls has been squirming with embarrassment over his connections with Paul Flowers. Balls is angrily what he’s branding a smear campaign over Labours connections with the ex Co-op chairman. Basically he’s saying “it’s not about me, and how me got £50K from the Co-op, it’s about all the poor Co-op customers worried about being Co-op customers” adding “look my face isn’t bright red with embarrassment that I’ve been caught. My face is bright red because I’ve just this very minute taken the male menopause”.

Balls insisted that Flowers, a former business adviser to Ed Miliband is no longer a member of the Labour Party. Flowers doesn’t know it yet because no one can find him to tell him.

 

The big problem for Balls is that bragged about this role in rubber stamping the legislation that paved the way for the disastrous takeover deal at the Co-op.

Balls also denies this. He said “That’s a lie, I didn’t brag about any role I had in rubber stamping the legislation because how could I when I have never, ever, even heard of the Co-operative Bank”

Questions are also being asked about the “soft loans” the Labour Party received from the Co-op. A soft loan is basically Flowers handing Labour a cheque for £1.2m and telling them “pay it back without any interest, and there’s no rush, sometime this millennium will be fine, and by the way here’s an extra £50k free gratis for my BFF Ed Balls to help with his office costs”

Balls is trying his hardest to distance himself from Flowers and complaining that the Prime Minister is making cheap political points rather than sorting it out. Of course Balls does a lot of distancing when things go wrong. He still hasn’t accepted any responsibility for his role in the last Labour administration which left the country in such a mess after he, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband took out a £20b loan. Not from the World Bank who it is normal for countries to borrow from. They took out the loan with Wonga.

Balls is also demanding a full inquiry into how someone like Flowers who with no banking experience somehow ended up as a bank chairman. Yes, he wants an inquiry now. He didn’t want an inquiry when someone like Flowers who with no banking experience was handing over the banks money with no questions asked. Anyone who has ever dealt with a bank will know that a bank handing over money,  WITHOUT  having them jump through hoops and putting their house and their kidneys up as collateral could be regarded as highly suspicious.

So how did Flowers become the Chairman?. What happened was that Flowers was unemployed and the Dept of Works and Pensions told him to take the job as the Chairman of the Co-op or they’d stop his benefits.

On the upside the unemployment figures did drop by one and they dropped quite a few more because with Flowers now having a bank chairman’s wages coming in he was employing half a dozen rent boys, not forgetting the drug dealer he had on retainer.

In a series of increasingly bad tempered Tv and radio interviews Balls insisted that he was unaware about the allegations concerning Flowers. Balls increasingly bad temper was due to every Tv and radio interviewer suggesting that his pants were on fire and that his nose was longer than a telephone wire.

Balls rejected Tory calls for him to repay the £50k but Balls insisted “I have not got £50,000 in my office to give back, and I don’t think it would be the right thing to do”.

He doesn’t have the £50k  because he spent it on “I love Paul Flowers” T shirts, and he doesn’t think it’s the right thing to do?.

Balls doesn’t think it’s the right thing to do as it would be homophobic not accept £50k from someone just because they used rent boys and had been convicted of gross indecency.

In saying that Balls admitted he knew all about Flowers when he accepted the cash.

Tory Mp Brooks Newmark said “This raises serious concerns about Ed Balls relationship the Co-op bank and the role he played in the merger. It also proves a sham of recent attempts to distance himself from Flowers”

A spokesman for Mr Balls said. Actually he couldn’t say anything as he collapsed and was rushed to hospital suffering from exhaustion. Exhaustion brought by a week of 24/7 spokesmanning on the Flowers scandal for Ed Balls.

Has any good come out of this. Yes, everyone who didn’t know what Balls was like, and admittedly it isn’t many, now sees him for exactly what he is.

A cringy embarrassment.

 

 

OFGEM

Energy regulator Ofgem has told five of the big electricity companies to cut the cost for consumers. Three of the companies responded “we would but we just can’t be bothered” and the other two said they’d respond once they stopped laughing”.

There’s a joke that energy companies tell which is: what’s got 22 legs and no testicles. Answer the 11 members of the board of Ofgem.

 

That’s almost funny, if a bit untrue as three of the board are women. But to ask: what’s got 22 legs and no testicles, but three of whatever has got no testicles are women, is far too much of a set up.

Ofgem reckon that the power companies should be able to deliver more for less. But the power companies claim that they have to invest in the infrastructure, after which they had to ask “did we manage to say that with a straight face”.

The answer is, no you didn’t.

 

 

ROYAL MAIL

Ofcom has told the Royal Mail that it must improve its service after failing to deliver 93% of first class letters on the day after they were posted. In response the Royal Mail said “Yes fair enough but we think we should be congratulated because we deliver junk on time a 100% of the time”

In some areas the first class next day delivery rate is a mere 62%. These areas apparently deal with a large volume of mail and it therefore takes a lot longer for the staff to go through all the envelopes to hold them up to the light to check if it’s a birthday car containing £10 sent by a granny to a grand kid.

Ofcom have the power to heavily fine Royal Mail for not meeting service targets. The problem with that is that to cover the fines Royal Mail will simply increase their prices. So if the service targets are consistently unmet sometime in the near future a first class stamp will cost £874.99, and it will still take a week to deliver it.

 

THE TIE RACK TO CLOSE, AND UNPUNISHED SMUGGLERS

THE TIE RACK

The Tie Rack has begun closing down its 44 remaining UK stores. Seems that the business model of concentrating on just one item of clothing just isn’t working anymore. Not after all the other menswear shops opened selling ties AND shirts to wear them with. The same applied to Tie Racks sister company the Hankie Shop.

The Tie Rack was an 80’s thing and the company was very successful in the 80s back when tie wearing was popular thanks to the Yuppie culture thing. But since 1990 the Tie Racks sales plummeted and they only managed to sell ties for funerals and for court appearances. If you are going to a funeral or appearing in court the good news is that the Tie Rack is having a closing down sale, which is hoped will be a lot better than Comet’s closing down sale which wasn’t really much of a closing down sale at all.

Sony 48 inch full HD smart TV was £999. Now £989.

No wonder Comet went bust, they couldn’t even get their everything must go clearance sale right. They went bust because they didn’t concentrate on sales, they concentrated on pushing extended warranties down their customers necks.

That sales philosophy was so entrenched that whenever a member of staff was handed their P45 they were asked “Now would you like to take an extended warranty out on that”.

The Tie Rack will close its doors forever just after the Xmas which will be a bit sad for train travellers because no longer will they have Tie Rack stores in stations to wander about in to pass the time until their very late train eventually turns up.

SMUGGLERS.

The government have reported that thousands of smugglers are going unpunished because of a breakdown in communications between HMRC and the Border Force. In 2011/2012 445.2 million cigarettes and 4.2 million litres of alcohol were seized and the seizures did not lead to any prosecutions. The reason being that Charles Kennedy successfully proved they were for his personal use by showing the Borders Force his passport and telling them “Look, I’m Charles Kennedy”.

The procedure for reporting smugglers caught by at the Borders was the Borders Agency phoning HMRC to inform them that they caught a smuggler trying to evade duty and HMRC would then issue financial penalties.

But since HMRC changed their phone systems it now takes almost 40 minutes of hitting telephone menu buttons before anyone can actually talk to a human being and the Borders Agency always get fed up and hang up.

Smuggling costs the UK Exchequer somewhere in the region of £6b a year in lost revenue. But it does lead to some great Xmas parties for the Borders Agency what with 4.2 million litres of alcohol to get through. Their parties cost the taxpayer millions though in photocopier paper and ink because people that drunk at office parties do tend to take an awful lot of photocopies of their backside. In the case of the Borders Agency, they annually used upwards of 170,000 reams of letterheaded high quality A4 paper on backside copying.

The government has claimed that all issues are being addressed, which they will be when they get back from all the Borders Agency offices Xmas parties which the government describes as “the best parties in the whole of the civil service”.

One last word from George Osborne. He is furious over the lost revenue. He said "How dare the smugglers make millions from cigarettes and alcohol, that's the governments thing"

MORE FLOWERS.

Ed Miliband has said “Labour acted with complete integrity” in its dealings with the Co-op bank and it’s disgraced ex chairman Paul Flowers.

Flowers of course was videotaped in a car handing over cash for drugs, and luckily for the Labour Party the tape ran out before Flowers could be filmed handing over £50.000 to Ed Balls who was sitting in the back seat.

David Cameron has accused Labour of knowing about Flowers past all along, but Miliband denies knowing anything. About Flowers?. No, Miliband denies knowing anything about anything, and the anything he knows nothing about includes flowers and the Unite Unions involvement in the Falkirk prospective candidate election process, and practically everything else.

MORE CO-OP PROBLEMS AND THE £148M DIVORCE

 

 

MORE FLOWERS

The Co-op has been plunged into fresh chaos as its chairman Len Wardle resigned for being responsible for appointing crack addict Paul Flowers to head the groups banking operation. It has emerged that Flowers is not only a crack addict, but he also has a conviction for gross indecency AND had to quit as a Labour councillor for having pornography on his official you shouldn’t really have porn on it council computer. Crack, gross indecency and porn, surprised he had any time left over to the do the job he was paid for.

Labour are now embroiled in the mess too and Ed Balls is under pressure to return a £50.000 Co-op donation  which was backed by the Rev Flowers.

Flowers attended a private meeting with Ed Miliband, something Miliband sort of denies claiming “Yes I had a meeting with Mr Flowers but we hardly spoke as he spent most of the time in the toilet or on his computer”

But did Flowers crack, porn and grossness affect his judgement?. According to Tory MP Brooks Newmark “Only someone who was out of their face on crack would hand over £50,000 to Ed Balls”. That’s a fact that can’t be disputed.

And really? Who apart from someone whose judgement is very seriously would ever trust Ed Balls when it comes to money.

Critics have questioned why Len Wardle appointed Flowers, a man with no banking experience, to the banking job in the first place. But Wardle explained “I’d had a few drinks at the time, so…………”

Further revelations in the Daily Mail reveal that Flowers allegedly had trysts with a rent boy in a hotel room paid for by the Co-op.

The bank doesn’t as yet know if the Co-op was billed by Flowers for the £650 a night rent boy but given what Flowers has been up to on the Co-op’s buck I’d check his  company credit card bill and look for any payments to any companies called Rentboys-r-us or Boys2rent, or a payment paid to hire One Direction to sing topless as his birthday party.

One person who is over the moon regarding the Flowers scandals is Fred Goodwin. He’s taken to wearing a T shirt with the message “I don’t look so bad now do I?” emblazoned on the front.

 

 

DIVORCE

Adam and Gillian Byford the couple who won £148m on the Euro lottery just over a year ago have announced that they are getting a divorce. At the time of their win the couple said that the huge amount of money they now had would bring them closer. Everyone assumed that they meant closer together, they meant closer to a divorce. The Daily Mail reported that they are now living in separate mansions. Separate mansions? That’s just rubbing it in how rich they are.

Ooh look at us, we can afford to live in separate mansions. Kind of makes you feel a lot less sorry for them doesn’t it.

At the time of their win it was thought they’d spend most of their winnings on personal  trainers, just to lose a wee bit of weight. It was also thought they’d lose the rest to a dethroned Nigerian Prince who they’d meet over the internet. But no, they seem to have held on to most of the money, apart from the £2m they had to pay Wonga after missing two monthly payments in repayments for the £75 they’d borrowed.

The press noted that they celebrated their win with a Domino pizza, so basically they celebrated with their normal breakfast, lunch, dinner and mid evening snack, their late evening snack and their getting up in the middle of the night because they were feeling a wee bit peckish snack.

 

Mr Byford continued to run his music shop because he loved it so much but had to give it up because he got fed up with people begging.

Seems George Osbourne was never away from his door.

The thing is: why do people agree to have their lottery win publicised. Most normal people would choose to remain completely anonymous because all the relatives they never even knew they had would come out of the woodwork and all be needing an urgent life saving operation for either themselves or their hamster who has a tumour.

But that’s the lottery PR machine for you. They don’t want such big winners remaining undisclosed because there wouldn’t be much PR value in Camelot announcing that they’d handed £148m over and all they could say about the winners was that they were maybe slightly overweight and maybe they should be worried about diabetes.

ENERGY PRICE RISE AND FREEZE, AND PAUL FLOWERS

8.2%

Power supplier SSE announced an 8.2% price rise. SSE Director of Customer Services Tony Keeley explained the increase saying “We have just found out that there is still some money in the UK that we don’t own yet”.

Speaking from his lair in a hollowed out undersea volcano in the Caribbean Keeley said that SSE only have a 5% profit margin with the other 95% going on wholesale gas prices, government levies and undersea volcano hollowing out.

TONY KEELEY

Up to 11% of every household bill goes on government programmes to save energy, reduce emissions and tackle climate change.

Tackling climate change means that a lot of people in the UK are freezing because other people somewhere in the world are too warm and want the sun turned down a bit. I’m assuming therefore that the government are using our money to build a giant thermostat for the sun.

That wouldn’t be the stupidest thing they’ve ever come up with. In fact it’s only about number 17 on the list of top 20 of Stupid Government Ideas.

Meanwhile energy is now centre stage in politics with Labour leader Len McCluskey’s Deputy Ed Miliband calling the price rise “a cost of living crisis”.

He has promised a temporary price freeze if Labour wins the next election and if anyone knows about cold its Ed Miliband. He’s now an expert on the subject after getting the cold shoulder from his brother ever since members of the Labour party put their X in the wrong box on the leadership ballot form and elected the wrong Miliband.

Political analysts were asked if Ed Miliband becomes the Prime Minister could he make good on his price freeze promise. They were unanimous, in laughing at the thought of Ed Miliband ever becoming the PM.

Miliband described SSE’s decision as a “scandal” and accused the government of “letting energy companies get away with this”. The PM David Cameron branded Miliband’s price freeze promise as a “con” saying that he did not have control over world gas prices.

The Labour deputy leader does not accept this claiming that Cameron does have control of world gas prices because he’s posh and posh people control everything. No they don’t. Lord Rothermere basically owns the Daily Mail and he can’t even control his own journalists to stop them writing stories about Miliband’s father being a Marxist and Ed’s policies being so funny that he’s a Groucho Marxist.

The powers that be and the powers that want to be can argue all they want over energy prices but when it boils down to it (that is if anyone can still afford the gas to boil anything) the consumer will be one who will bear the brunt of the increases. And anyway the government are secretly quite happy about the energy price increases. The reason being. It’s led to people forgetting that they are paying £1.36 or so for a litre of petrol and even more for a litre of diesel. But there was great news from the Chancellor on that front because George Osborne stated categorically that he was freezing the 2p annual fuel duty increase. Thanks to George the motorist will only be paying a reasonable and quite justified £1.36 per litre instead of an utterly outrageous £1.38. We are all saving a whopping 2p, brilliant. Although what can you do with 2p. Quite a lot actually, if you are Barry Scott (whoever Barry Scott is) because Barry uses 2ps to illustrate how clean Cillit Bang gets your two pence peices. Let's be honest here the Cillit Bang advert is less of an advert and more of a public service announcement because there is nothing worse in the world than having a pocket full of dirty 2ps.  A good money saving tip, at least psychologically anyway, is always only work out what your car gets to the gallon. For example, saying "My car gets 30 miles to the gallon" doesn't sound too bad. Finding out that your car gets 7.5 miles to the litre and that litre costs £1.36 is frankly just depressing. Knowing that makes you realise that you'd be better off going around in a rented chaffuer driven Limo.

THE NEXT BANK SCANDAL

PPI Payment protection insurance, CPP card protection plan, the mis-selling of mortgages, Libor....................is there anything the banks haven’t been up to. Apparently not, and the latest scandal about to hit the headlines involves hole in the wall cash machines. Seems that whenever a customer inserts a bank card to withdraw money the machine collects a tiny bit of their DNA and uses the DNA to create an exact clone which they then put to work in a factory in the Far East sewing together English Premier League football tops.

This in effect means that if you use a cash machine there’s a 99% chance that there’s another you working for nothing in a sweat shop somewhere. Basically the banks are taking identity theft to a whole new level, which is ironic really considering that CPP was supposed to be an insurance against this kind of thing happening.

This story is about to break in the sister publication to the British Medical Journal of Evil. Do you think for one minute that the Hadron Collider in Switzerland is actually being used to accelerate particles?

The whole thing is just a front for a huge cloning programme. Why do you think the Swiss have so many bank vaults? It’s because they need somewhere to store the clones before Swissair flies them out to China.

The banks have put aside billions to cover the compensation payments but the customers who’ve been replicated won’t receive all their compensation. They’ll have to split it 50/50 with their clone.

Bad though this is in itself it the situation could be a lot worse. Fortunately Jedwards management doesn’t allow them access to their own money and therefore as they don’t have bank cards they haven’t been cloned by ATM’s.

So thankfully there are still just two of them.
On the Libor scandal. The banks got off very lightly because the average man in the street and everyone who works for the Financial Services Authority hasn't actually got a clue what Libor is. The banks were fined a few million, but as they'd made billions they were hardly having to visit the Department of Social Security offices begging for a crisis loan.

SANTANDER ADVERT BAN

Santander has fallen foul of the Advertising Standards Authority over an ad for their 123 Account that features Irish golfer Rory Mcilroy. The ASA received 27,000 complaints from people left terrified and traumatised by the advert in which a woman closes her fridge door to find Mcilroy standing in her kitchen staring at her like some sort of cross between a serial killer and a registered sex offender. Many of the complainants have been so traumatised that they haven’t been able to go anywhere near their fridge ever since.

A spokesman for Santander said “When we talked to his agent about appearing in the ad the agent maybe should have mentioned to us that Rory was just a big bit scary and creepy, so it’s not really our fault”.

He added “It’s just as well that we didn’t go with the director’s idea to over dub the ad with the Psycho shower scene violin music or we’d been in even more trouble with the ASA”.

True, because the over dubbing of the Jaws theme was alarming enough.

It has to be asked though why Santander put the ad out in the first place. Surely when the ad agency showed the company’s bosses the commercial before it was aired at least one of them should have asked “So we’re trying to frighten people into taking out a 123 Account are we?”

“Actually, yes”.

“Well you’ve nailed it”

FLOWERS.

It to be asked how did the Reverend Paul Flowers ever get to be the chairman of the Co-operative Bank? On the other hand maybe the crystal meth and crack cocaine he allegedly bought was produced by Fairtrade crystal meth and crack cocaine farmers in the Third World. Therefore he was adhering to the Co-op’s ethical policies which is surely some sort of good news for the troubled company whose new slogan is……

THE CO-OPERATIVE, GOOD WITH FOOD, CRAP WITH MONEY.

It’s also transpired that Flowers committed gross indecency with a man in a public toilet. Doesn’t that show his commitment to the Co-operative because it means that he’s more than willing to go the extra mile to persuade George Michael to switch the millions he has in accounts over to the Co-op.