In an interview with Jon Snow on Channel 4 News this evening, Lord Myners called for the full implementation of Glass-Steagall to tackle bank corruption, a policy that I have called for for many years.
Paul Myners was appointed Financial Services Secretary in Gordon Brown's government, a role which gave him a life peerage as he was not an MP.
His comments were made during a Channel 4 News panel discussing evidence given by former Barclays Bank chief executive Bob Diamond to the Treasury Select Committee on Wednesday.
Towards the end of the discussion, Snow told Miners:
Paul Miners, there was the Vickers report on banking, and yet Vickers tried to segregate casino activity from retail activity. But I don't think bankers will respect the segregation. If there is segregation, they will climb it, dig under it, or go through it. Banking should be split into retail and casino, do you agree?
Miners responded:
Yes, I believe that is correct. Evidence in recent weeks, and Diamond himself, have said that many of the problems that arose at Barclays were within the scope of the ring-fencing that was envisaged. Now the government has already weakened the ring-fencing proposed by Vickers, but ring-fencing is not enough. We need to move to a model of complete separation, known as the Glass-Steagall model…
Myners has had a long career in finance, becoming chief executive of the pension fund manager Gartmore Group in 1985 and subsequently chairman from 1987 to 2001. He served as a director of NatWest Bank until it was acquired by the Royal Bank of Scotland in the spring of 2000.
In August 2010, Myners became a director of RIT Capital Partners, a major investment fund chaired and backed by Lord Jacob Rothschild, and later that year he became a trustee of ARK, a charity backed by a major London hedge fund manager.
In 2000 he became chairman of the Guardian Media Group, which publishes the Guardian and Observer newspapers.
In the same interview, Jon Snow asked Lucy Marcus of Marcus Ventures about her opinion of Barclays, to which she replied:
… Not only Bob Diamond but the board must be held accountable for this…There is also what I call the “director contagon.” John Varley, who was the chief executive of Barclays, is no longer with us, but he was to some extent responsible and sits on the boards of non-financial companies around the world.
With these sentiments in mind, the question arises: will the BBC remove Marcus Agius from its board?
