Beyond the green baize
ONCE upon a time, it was an institution run like a gentleman's club, with the com- mittee on one side of the green baize door and the staff and secretary on the other. Stocks in those days were exchanged on a trading floor, which the club owned. Tech- nological change undermined that mono- poly, Big Bang blew it away, and the Exchange had to recast itself as a competi- tive business. The green baize was stripped out, the committee turned itself into a board and the headhunters went looking for a chief executive. He soon bit the dust, so did his successor, and so did Taurus, the paperless share-dealing system that was always two years from success. So did the plans to form what was called an alliance with Frankfurt. So perhaps the best thing was to roll the two putative allies together and let Deutsche Borse's Werner Seifert run them both? Luckier than his two prede- cessors, the chief executive could bow out with a cheque for £4 million. It was a flawed deal, thought Andrew Hilton and David Lascelles of the Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation: 'It reeks of loss of nerve and short-termism in London — per- haps jollied along by the interest of some of the biggest brokers.' The Exchange's other members were told to vote for it as the only deal on offer. It isn't.
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