The Evil Diaries: The Dimmies Get Clean Away With It

Evil discusses the Canadian dollar, Quindell and the FCA…

It is time to get short of the Canadian dollar or “loonie” against the USD. The offer price of the loonie is currently 1.25 or so to acquire one USD. I do not know why this is the trade. But I have had good advice and am happy to pass it on. One might make 20% or so over the next year. For more analysis on the Canadian dollar CLICK HERE.

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I again shorted Quindell (QPP) at 90p. This is because there is no bid from Slater and Gordon (there never could have been – just as S and G advised the ASX market) and because I have not been had by the PR offensive. When Rose and Sutcliffe took options to subscribe for £21m of stock at 68p they were well aware of the risk and because the other NEDs knew that it was uphill all the way and that, in any event, there was no bid. After all, had there been any prospect of a bid there would have been the small problem of insider trading.

I do not know what Martin Hughes of Tosca is doing on QPP. I suspect he does not either. He has previous form on wild gambling.

Anyway, my target remains zero even though I accept that it might settle higher after the full bloodbath is announced pursuant to PwC reporting at the end of February.

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Companies House extended the carelessness in practice that has been education policy in this country in recent times by noting the file of Taylor and Sons Limited that it had gone into financial difficulties. They got it wrong and should have stated the same of Taylor and Son Limited. As a result, claim the former’s managers and owners, its business was destroyed.

This has led to a claim by them against Companies House of the order of £9m. Apparently, Companies House took three (!) days to rectify their error. But whereas one can understand a company experiencing a frantic day or so of telephoning it is hard to imagine a solid balance sheet being unable to cope with this sort of incompetence on the part of Companies House. Which in turn suggests that Taylor and Sons Limited had other problems.

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As some of you already know, I have been banging on at the abject scandal of the FCA’s paying out £3.8m to “cleanse” itself through a lawyer-led investigation into the FCA’s handling of price-sensitive information. The FCA’s Wheatley and its chairman, Griffith-Jones, are just a pair of grotesquely overpromoted and overpaid prats who have pissed away nearly 1% of the FCA’s total annual budget on virtually nothing. I was hoping that Andrew Tyrie, chairman of the HoC Treasury Select Committee, would have a real go at this pair of dimmies. But he did not. So the dimmies get clean away with it.

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However, I go a bundle on the late Lady Caroline Gosling who, it is recorded, was often asked to judge dog shows where the prize was not necessarily awarded to the best canine. She awarded one particular prize at the Hawkridge Revels Show in respect of the dog “most like its owner” to the same person three years in succession even though he brought a different dog on each occasion. “Such a nice man,” she told her somewhat bemused fellow adjudicators.