SIB gets it right
I WAS about to tease the Securities and Investments Board on finding another menace to protect us all against — the non-executive directors of the Big Four banks. The rules say that whenever they or their families buy or sell shares, whether or not it has anything to do with the bank they non-executively direct, they must tell the bank all about it, at once, and an eminent metal basher on the board of the Midland has become sufficiently fed up with this to resign. I am, though, declaring a morator- ium on teasing the SIB — partly for a change, but mainly because it has sus- pended DPR Futures from trading and is investigating it. I do not prejudge that investigation if I say that DPR is a clone of LHW Futures, that both firms sold futures contracts to private clients, that they had a reputation for high-pressure salesmanship, that their income came from the clients' commission payments which rose as the clients traded more heavily, and that some clients tried to trade their way out of trouble and turned setbacks into disasters. The SIB, as I keep telling it, ought to begin its work from a sense of where the shoe pinches. It pinched miserably here.
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