Credit Suisse is sorry not sorry about tuna bonds
When I worked at the Reuters Moscow bureau, I dreaded having to write corrections. We all had pieces of paper pinned to our desks to remind us of the most frequent mistakes – mixing up “billion” and “million”; misspelling the name of one of the many countries we were responsible for; absentmindedly declaring someone to be dead when they were very much alive – but those weren’t the worst errors.
The really embarrassing corrections were those that revealed assumptions we’d had no idea we’d made, such as having called a female politician “he”; or assumed someone with an Anglo name was British rather than Australian. And what made them worse was the fact that colleagues found them hilarious, and would email them around, something that Twitter has super-charged.
Anyway, it is in that spirit of schadenfreude – combined with my distinctly nerdy interest in all things financially criminal -- that I appreciated this “clarification” from the Financial Times.
- “An article on October 20 containing a comment criticizing the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority for not taking action against Credit Suisse over the bank’s role in the Mozambique “tuna bonds” scandal went to press before the FCA announced its own settlement with the bank, including a $200m fine.”
Whoops. I feel for the journalists though: 99 times out of a hundred, they’d have been right to assume British agencies would do nothing about a giant corruption scandal and criticize them for it, but this was the hundredth occasion, when the affair was so ginormous that even U.K. authorities took notice of it.