Smartest Operators

They say a week is a long time in politics – in which case six months locked out of Whitehall could seem like an eternity. That will certainly be the case for Deloitte, the accountancy giant which is used to taking vast streams of income from the Government, but which this week had to accept a half-year ban on getting new contracts. After all, this is a group that has survived toxic ties to Sir Fred Goodwin, the MG Rover scandal and even a lawsuit over its audit of a bank that funnelled money to drug barons and Hezbollah. It may irk David Sproul, the £2.8million a year boss of Deloitte – but will it really harm the firm? How Deloitte squeezes millions out of Government: City's most rapacious accountancy firm is banned from Westminster for toxic Brexit memo

Macquarie Group has been called many things over the years: The Millionaires Factory because it makes its employees very rich; The Silver Doughnut because its logo resembles a frozen Eye of Sauron; and a "bunch of bankers" because Richard Branson didn't like how Virgin Australia was treated by Sydney Airport. 

But hats off to the Poms who have come up with "The Vampire Kangaroo" . 

The nickname is (we can only assume) an affectionate nod to the famous 2010 Rolling Stone feature about Goldman Sachs which likened the Wall Street behemoth to: "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money".

Macquarie (or any self-respecting vampiric marsupial for that matter) would never do that sort of thing to humanity, of course. But a recent article in The Sunday Times does refer to the Sydney-based bank's "sprawling interests and ruthless profit taking".

So what's got the British so riled up?

Well Macquarie is said to be one of two final bidders for the UK government's Green Investment Bank. Set up in 2012 to commit capital to green infrastructure projects including wind farms, waste and bioenergy and offshore renewables, Green Bank was put up for sale last year by pre-Brexit Chancellor George Osborne. 

Why the British are calling Macquarie 'The Vampire Kangaroo

IT should now be clear that the ‘smartest and greediest guys in the room’ at Macquarie Bank unveiled an early Christmas turkey eight days ago.

At the risk of mixing metaphors, any Tatts Group shareholders silly enough to try ‘eating’ it would, further, discover they were chewing on plastic — of, incidentally, biased George Bush myth not reality, by the bye.

In plain terms, they were just too greedy and smart-arse to the point of announcing they were trying to ‘double-dud’ Tatts holders. That’s to say, MacBank & Co were trying to dud Tatts holders of considerable value by slipping them a dud deal that couldn’t really fly.  Even a Macquarie Bank turkey won’t fly

The British government had been expected to announce by the end of 2016 who would purchase the GIB, which the tory government, under the leadership of the then Prime Minister David Cameron announced would be privatised in June 2015. The formal sell-off process began in March and Australia's Macquarie Bank is poised to be announced as the winning bidder. Bloomberg on Wednesday, citing a source familiar with the process, reported the UK government is set to agree to a deal to sell the GIB to Macquarie Group in early January.

But that prospect has alarmed some MPs who say Macquarie Bank's past behaviour disqualified it to look after the green bank. Worst kind of company': Alarm in Britain over Macquarie Bank's proposed takeover of UK's Green Investment Bank