John Key departs:
Whenever a leading political figure tells you he is
departing the scene for family reasons you know he or she is telling a porkie…sometimes
it’s a hell of a big porkie or just a wee porkie but a porkie it is. He or she
uses the family excuse because they don’t want you to know the true reasons.
Now our Prime Minister has just resigned from being PM.
There is nothing heroic or brave about doing that, although most PM’s wait
until they lose an election.
But that is not in the character history of John Key. The
history modus operandi of John Key has always been, to target whatever you want,
then go out and get [buy] it…by fair means or fowl and then move on to the next challenge.
The evidence is there for anyone to see: Have a look at his
track record:
Looking at the History of John Key in relation to his
financial abilities here are some facts and figures regarding his major
employer Merrill Lynch and their general performance…
Key's first job
was in 1982, as an auditor at McCulloch Menzies, and he then moved to be a
project manager at Christchurch-based clothing manufacturer Lane Walker Rudkin for
two years.
Key began working
as a foreign exchange dealer at Elders Finance in Wellington, and rose to the
position of head foreign exchange trader two years later, then moved to
Auckland-based Bankers Trust in 1988.
In 1995, he
joined Merrill Lynch as head of Asian foreign exchange in Singapore.
That same year he was promoted to Merrill's global head of foreign exchange,
based in London,
where he may have earned around US$2.25 million a year including bonuses, which
is about NZ$5 million at 2001 exchange rates.
Some co-workers
called him "the smiling assassin" for maintaining his usual
cheerfulness while sacking dozens (some say hundreds) of staff after heavy
losses from the 1998 Russian financial crisis. He was
a member of the Foreign Exchange Committee of the New York Federal Reserve Bank from
1999 to 2001.
In 2001, he
headed back to New Zealand to fulfill a long held ambition to stand for
Parliament and become Prime Minister.
It was fortunate that he did
because Merrill Lynch went into free-fall:
In 2002, Merrill
Lynch settled for a fine of $100 million for publishing misleading
research. As part of the agreement with the New York attorney general and other
state securities regulators, Merrill Lynch agreed to increase research
disclosure and work to decouple research from investment banking. A well-known
analyst at Merrill Lynch named Henry
Blodget wrote in company e-mails in which Blodget gave assessments about
stocks which conflicted with what was publicly published by Merrill.
In 2003, he was
charged with civil securities fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange
Commission. He settled without admitting or denying the allegations and was
subsequently barred from the securities industry for life. He paid a $2 million
fine and $2 million disgorgement. The CEO at that time, David Komansky,
said, "I want...to publicly apologize to our clients, our
shareholders, and our employees," for the company falling short of its
professional standards in research.
In 2004
convictions of Merrill executives marked the only instance in the Enron investigation
where the government criminally charged any officials from the banks and
securities firms that allegedly helped the energy giant execute its accounting
fraud. The case revolved around a 1999 transaction involving Merrill,
Enron and the sale of some electricity-producing barges off the coast of
Nigeria.
The charges
surrounded the 1999 sale of an interest in Nigerian energy
barges by an Enron entity to Merrill Lynch was a sham that allowed Enron to
illegally book about $12 million in pretax profit, when in fact there was
no real sale and no real profit. Four former Merrill top executives and two
former midlevel Enron officials faced conspiracy and fraud charges.
Merrill cut its
own deal, firing bankers and agreeing to the outside oversight of its
structured-finance transactions. It also settled civil fraud charges brought by
the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, without admitting or denying
fault.
In 2002 Merrill
Lynch settled for 10 million civil penalties as a result of improper activities
that took place out of the firm's Fort Lee New Jersey office. Three financial
advisors, and a fourth who was involved to a lesser degree, placed 12,457
trades for a client Millennium Partners in at least 521 mutual funds and 63
mutual fund sub-accounts of at least 40 variable annuities.
Millennium made
profits in over half of the funds and fund sub-accounts. In those funds where
Millennium made profits, its gains totaled about $60 million. Merrill
Lynch failed to reasonably supervise these financial advisers, whose market
timing siphoned short-term profits out of mutual funds and harmed long-term
investors.
Other controversies
with Key as PM were:
During the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, Key was a
proponent of Hosni Mubarak's government, citing his support of Israel and refusing
to call for his resignation. When asked if Mubarak should step down, he said
"no".
In 2011, Key was
caught up in a controversy over the purchase of government limousines which he
denied knowledge of initially but later reports surfaced his office was aware.
He was accused of being dishonest and eventually apologised, calling the deal
sloppy.
In October 2011,
Key made a statement where he claimed Standard and Poor's had said at a meeting
in the prior month that "if there was a change of Government, that
downgrade would be much more likely", this claim was contradicted by
S&P after Key's credibility had been called into question.
Listing his
latest set of fibs for example the Dirty Politics raid on Kim Dotcom and raid
on Nicky Hagar's home, his pony tail pulling etc. His close connection to Cameron
Slater, Jason Ede, etc. simply proves the point that Key will use anything to
win.
The one thing he
[Key] cannot stand is to lose: Hence his resignation…
I’ve no doubt
that he has something lined up…a job or a money making scheme or whatever…we
should know the answer around August 2017… if not sooner if some journalist
does a bit of investigative journalism rather than sitting in front of his
computer pumping out PR crap…
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