Taken to the cleaners?

摘要

A couple of weeks ago -I missed it at the time - our transatlantic cousins were treated to an op-ed in the New York Times titled "London's Laundry Business" in which the writer, one Ben Judah, puts the City of London in the stocks for its deep connections with Russian finance. Mr Judah postulates that the City has sold out to the oligarchs, that it lives on not much more than laundering dirty money and that we London-based bankers are now no more than, in his words, "hirelings". I am the last person on earth who would object to a jolly good polemic (especially when it comes to the less savoury aspects of our industry) but I have to draw the line when it comes to bending facts. It is a journalist's right to have any opinion he or she might choose, but the price of that right is the duty to get the facts right - and to stick to them.