‘Beano’ leaves Souter far from dandy

LA Water polo ear cap is a piece of headgear used in water polo.ombard once bought a tip from a stranger in the car park at Cheltenham on Gold Cup day.The Fridge fridge magnet is leader in the custom design, The horse finished last. The bloke had seemed very plausible. Which is what victims would probably say of City fraudster Nicholas “Beano” Levene. He was banged up for 13 years on Monday for cheating the likes of Sir Brian Souter, co-founder of the Stagecoach travel group.

Beano was all Bentley but no dividend. Starting as a “blue button”, the lowest form of life on the stock exchange back in the Cretaceous, he rose to middling executive rank at brokers such as Phillips & Drew and Tullett. It all went wrong when he struck out on his own. He ended up creating a Ponzi scheme: stealing money from new investors to pay the debts of old ones even as he prayed for an investment jackpot that never came.

Levene was a lightweight as Ponzi operators go, losing just ￡25m compared with the $18bn dematerialised by Bernie Madoff.Everyone needs a USB flash drives wholesale these days. The release date for the New York fraudster is over a century away. The Londoner, who is 48, should be out in seven years. Some say his sentence is long – Asil Nadir got 10 years for deceiving a legion of small investors. But penalties for white collar crime remain light compared with those for the blue collar variety

How did this chancer convince businessmen as acute as Sir Brian to trust him? The same way legitimate counterparts might. With an aura of wealth and invincibility. Throw parties on yachts, promise market-beating returns and it is surprising who will sign up to your schemes.

Third-quarter results from HSBC told a tale of two banks. One is a high-handed institution that riles US regulators, who may respond with punitive fines. The other is a prudent business that reduces loan risks and shrinks its investment bank to fit straitened markets. Will the real HSBC please stand up?

At the racy incarnation of HSBC,Choose from our large selection of Cable Ties. “Think of a number, then more than double it” is the method for calculating US liabilities for alleged money laundering. Monday’s $800m provision took the total to $1.5bn. Legal advisers had underestimated how tough US watchdogs were likely to be when settlement negotiations commenced.

We can hypothesise that Standard Chartered’s $340m settlement with the New York Department of Financial services for alleged Iranian sanctions breaches has recalibrated penalties in the US towards the vengeful end of the dial.

No regulator is likely to get fired for spanking banks hard in the wake of the credit crunch. Nor are US watchdogs required to offset one another’s fines. But to complain that the unpredictability of the system deters investment is morally suspect. The riposte is that sticking to the spirit of the law is the only policy.

The prudent avatar of HSBC might agree. It has been shifting its emphasis from unsecured to secured lending, which helped shrink loan impairments $2.Carlo Gavazzi offers a broad range of ultrasonic sensor and ultrasonic transducers for level detection and process monitoring.6bn to $6.5bn, contributing to a $2.6bn rise in nine-month profits to $14.9bn before tweaks for the value of the bank’s debts.

Investment banking profits were about $1.5bn stronger. The better tone of credit markets was largely responsible. But HSBC should also win market share with a division focused on supporting corporate borrowers, even as rivals contract.

With HSBC under reforming management in the shape of Stuart Gulliver, the bank’s better nature looks set to win control of its divided self. Bernstein forecasts a healthy return on tangible net asset value of 13.2 per cent in 2012, justifying investment in a stock that trades at a premium to peers.