cunts
Goldman Sachs is on course to pay its top City bankers multimillion-pound bonuses - despite asking the U.S. government for an emergency bail-out.
The struggling Wall Street bank has set aside £7billion for salaries and 2008 year-end bonuses, it emerged yesterday.
Each of the firm's 443 partners is on course to pocket an average Christmas bonus of more than £3million.
The size of the pay pool comfortably dwarfs the £6.1billion lifeline which the U.S. government is throwing to Goldman as part of its £430billion bail-out.
As Washington pours money into the bank, the cash will immediately be channelled to Goldman's already well-heeled employees.
News of the firm's largesse will revive the anger over the 'rewards for failure' culture endemic in the world of high finance.
The same bankers who have brought the global economy to its knees seem to pocketing the same kind of rewards they got during the boom years.
Gordon Brown has vowed to crack down on the culture of greed in the City as part of his £500billion bail-out of the UK banking industry.
But that won't affect the estimated 100 London partners working at Goldman Sachs's London headquarters.
The firm - known as Golden Sacks for the bumper bonuses it pay its top bankers - is expected to cut the payouts by a third this year. However, profits are
falling much faster. Earnings have plunged 47 per cent so far this year amid the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
This has wiped more than 50 per cent off the company's market value.
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Drugs boss rues Armstrong stance - The head of the French anti-doping agency tells BBC Sport that Lance Armstrong has missed a chance to prove his detractors wrong over doping claims. [bbc cycling]
Look what the fails at our local circus telecoms regulator have managed to come up with. If this doesn't say fail all over it then nothing because it does say fail all over it, so there is no if not. And they made me use such vulgar language in the tags for this article. Please nobody show my mother she'd be so upset. Thanks.
Millions of LANs to pay licence fees
[Cape Town | ITWeb, 29 September 2008] - Every local area network (LAN) in the country would have to pay at least a R1 000 licence exemption fee, if ICASA's latest draft licence fee regulations are followed to their logical conclusion, lawyers says.
E-lawyers Dominic Cull and Mike Silber, of Ellipsis Regulatory Affairs, say the draft regulations by the telecommunications regulator do not specify if such local area networks are for private or commercial use.
“This means that possibly millions of local area networks, or even wide area networks, that are in existence and were exempted under the old Telecommunications Act, would now have to pay to obtain that exemption,” Cull says.
However, Denis Smit, MD of research firm BMI-TechKnowledge, believes this is not what ICASA intends with these regulations.
“Although I haven't examined the regulations, I do not believe that ICASA wants everybody to pay such a licence fee. Surely, they must differentiate between those networks intended for commercial use and those that are not,” he says.
No one knows just how many local and wide area networks are in the country. However, estimates are that it could be more than a million.
“The problem with the regulations is that they also potentially include local area networks set up in the home where a person may have an ADSL line and a wireless router. Would the homes then need to pay a R1 000 licence exemption fee?” Silber says.
Last week, ICASA issued a document to set out the licence fees for the industry in terms of the Electronic Communications Act. The objectives of the regulations is to set licence fees payable in respect of an application or registration for a licence amendment, transfers, or renewals.
The main issue dealt with in the draft regulations is the licence fees for class electronic communications services and electronic communications network services licences (ECNS).
The individual ECNS fees are not covered because the communications minister still has to issue a policy directive and then ICASA has to issue an invitation to those telecommunications companies to apply for such I-ECNS licences.
ICASA had not responded to ITWeb's queries by the time of publication.