Sex and banks and rock and roll

It seems that all this blog is writing about these days is sex and banking, but the papers are full of sex, rock & roll and death in banking this week so it is unavoidable.

For example, here are three stories which illustrate how the rich vein of  real life runs through our banking lives.

For starters are the shocking revelations from a certain Jordan Wimmer about life in the Hedge Fund Nomos Capital, run by alleged lothario Mark Lowe.

Miss Wimmer, whose salary increased tenfold over a four year period to £577,000 a year, accuses Mr. Lowe of perpetual harassment and hiring a Russian hitman to killl her, resulting in her breakdown last year.

According to the Daily Mail * Miss Wimmer claims that Mr Lowe subjected her to all sorts of deplorable behaviour as part of her job, including watching him cavort is a sexual manner with various women.

I sympathise with Miss Wimmer but that sounds like the usual City way of life (when will this change?) especially as, in Mr. Lowe’s defence, he claims that the person in hot pants in question, Miss Ling, is in fact a Malaysian banker who liked to dress attractively for him as she was his girlfriend.

Yea right.

Meanwhile, in the same news day is the tragic story of Huibert Boumeester, the respected banker with ABN AMRO who lost his job after the takeover by Royal Bank of Scotland in 2007.  The result is that he sank into a depression and shot himself in June of this year.

This sort of story is appearing more and more often in our community, and no-one feels this is a good time for banking. Nevertheless, the media witch hunt over bonuses continues to grab the headlines rather than these tragically human stories.

Finally, on the same newsday, is the tittle in Tatler about Roger Jenkins' wife, Diana.

Roger Jenkins is the A-List celebrity banker with Barclays who pulled together the Middle Eastern bailout in January that meant the bank could avoid slipping into the UK Government’s ownership.

He claims that it was Diana’s key role that made this happen, “charming the Qatari royal family into parting with the £7.3 billion that saved” the bank and creating “the Roger brand”.

It was also Diana who made the party happen last Christmas for Charity.  A-list stars attended including George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson and Bono, and £10 million was raised in one night for Darfur.

But Diana Jenkins, who is a Bosnian, has now moved to Malibu because she was treated “like an Eastern European mail-order bride” by London society apparently.

Speaking of London's party circuit, she says that “you have to have your priorities right first. No kid wants the private plane first - they want their parents. That's where all those social girls get it so wrong. My kids would rather be with me in a shack than with a stranger in a private plane who calls themselves a mother.”

She really did not like the snobbery in London.

No wonder she moved to Malibu rather than New York, where the Desperate Hedgewives are just as bad.

It also makes me think that Miss Wimmer might learn a thing or two from Mrs Jenkins.

All in all, just another week in the world of high finance.

* in the original blog entry, we mentioned that Ms. Charity Wanju was cited in the court case.  This information was not presented accurately, for which we unreservedly apologise to Ms. Wanju if this caused offence.