Birds Of A Feather

How strange. My previous post about Andrew Greystoke rose rapidly up the Google rankings but has just as suddenly disappeared, even if you search "Andrew Greystoke + Hong Kong + fumier". In other words, Google has excluded it, although all the information in the post save Mr. Greystoke's presence in Hong Kong came from other sites found through a Google search.

Could it be that, despite its content consisting entirely, apart from Mr. Greystoke's visit here, of matters which are both public record and also covered extensively elsewhere on the Interweb, it touched a nerve, that one of Greystoke's Hong Kong cohorts tipped Greystoke the wink, and a Tarzan minion asked Google to remove the site from search results. No, surely not.

If it is the case, however, it would not be the first time that a sensitive flower has asked (or not, as the case may be) for a foamie exclusive to be removed from the searches. I remember a few years back the same thing happening (or maybe not) when I posted about a charity vanity site (using only the words of the site itself) called Hong Kong People, run by socialites David and Cara Weil, (with the luvly-bubbly Mabel Au-Yeung to give it some credibility). Up the rankings it went then it disappeared, perhaps after a Google vanity search. In this respect, it mirrored the performance of the charity itself which sank without trace (apart from in the Companies Registry's records) shortly afterwards, having - according to its accounts - racked up only about HK$10,000 in inward donations (receipts) and quite a lot more than that in expenses (hence no outward donations to the actual charities it was supposed to benefit) in its short life). Not a very good story for the old dinner circuit in the end, sadly.

Just for old times' sake I may repost that one soon, together with an account of its death throes.

A Grey Area

Watch out, Hong Kong, Andrew Greystoke is about. The purveyor of financial services, unaffectionately known as Tarzan, and about as convincing face to face, is on a visit trying to drum up business. (For Greystoke's unintentionally hilarious blog, look here.)
 
Greystoke's connections with Hong Kong go way back, at least as far back as 2005 when the numerous Spanish-based boiler plate scams which his law firm, Atlantic Law, "recklessly" (according to the UK FSA) endorsed under their UK FSA licence were investigated by the FSA with the help of the Hong Kong Police, the Hong Kong SFC and other bodies.
 
As a result of this, Greystoke and his firm were together fined £400,000 and Greystoke was banned for life from working in any capacity in financial services. Quite how this sits with his continuing hawking of too-good-to-be true UK listing services is an interesting question.
 
This decision was followed by action from the Solicitors Regulation Authority for "bringing the profession into disrepute". Getting lawyers a bad name? That's quite an achievement. And last year the law firm was liquidated in an action brought by a former employee with debts of approaching  £1m (including amounts which Greystoke claims were owed to his wife). 
 
These were not the first setbacks in Greystoke's career. Declared bankrupt in 1996 following an unsuccessful libel action against Lloyds of London, Greystoke had already made a name for himself in various ventures which had, by a sequence of astonishingly bad luck, left a trail of failure, debt and impoverished punters. Following the FSA decision in 2010, one report summarised, doubtless incorrectly, thus:

"What no one seems to have noticed," the Times commented last week, "is that Greystoke already has a bad record in the City." No one, that is, except regular readers of the Eye, and since 2003 the Mail on Sunday's Tony Hetherington, both of which have been sounding the alarm - the Eye for almost a quarter of a century - about this serial spiv and financial fantasist, who was also a Tory councillor in Westminster during the Shirley Porter era.

"Since the mid-1980s we have been chronicling the various corporate disasters with which he has been associated - Slater Walker America, Maddock, Bremar Holdings, Castle Mill and City & Westminster Group, which collapsed in 1991. By 1995 he owed more than £5m to creditors, including Lloyd's of London, which received a letter from Tarzan's psychiatrist pleading "mitigating circumstances".

"Greystoke was made bankrupt in June 1996. The Department of Timidity & Inaction had started efforts in 1993 to disqualify him as a director over the City & Westminster fiasco - his company City & Westminster collapsed within months of being injected into what became City & Westminster Group - but these were presumably rendered unnecessary by his bankruptcy and never pursued.

"Having failed at business he reinvented himself as a lawyer, but he couldn't kick the spivvy habit - representing, among others, the iffy and whiffy Brain Games Network plc, run by chess impresario Raymond "the Penguin" Keene and fronted by Tory grandee Sir Jeremy Hanley."




For an insight into the level at which this snake oil, sorry, amazing metal coatings, salesman operates, one can do worse than read the report  by the Financial Services and Markets Tribunal, of Greystoke's failed appeal against the FSA decision, in which his evidence, truthfulness and credibility and the methods of the thieves he unwittingly, or was it "recklessly", assisted to steal some million of pounds of pensioners' savings were assessed:

Greystoke's evidence:
"The Applicants (Greystoke and Atlantic Law) continued to approve promotions even after the FSA had begun an investigation and further matters of concern had come to light. These facts speak for themselves."

"It is unfortunately clear that he has made claims in this application that he must have known to be untrue."
 
"When cross-examined Mr Greystoke recalled, apparently for the first time, that he may have been referring to a conversation with Eben Hamilton QC. That seemed to be an example of a witness caught out telling one untruth seeking to cover it up by telling another."

"There is some pattern in Mr Greystoke's conduct of making inaccurate claims and, when found out, apologising to the minimum degree and expecting to move on."


"It follows that we reject the evidence of Mr Greystoke where it is inconsistent with the surrounding material and the probabilities."

And those whom he "recklessly" assisted's, methods: "The phone calls contain[ed] threats, blackmail, derision and insults ... threats including 'to come to see [an 86-year old] … and gang rape her' ". Nice people, and I am sure that Mr. Greystoke was shocked, shocked, I tell you, to discover this.

Yes, dear reader, be careful out there..

A Little Bit On The Top

Ebeneezers, Wanchai purveyors of fine junk food to pissed gweilos, streetwalkers taking the weight off, and respectable persons such as your correspondent, are either falling on hard times or getting greedy.

I patronised one of their outlets the other day, intending to enjoy their nutritious prawn curry and chips, which I ordered at the counter for in-house consumption, but imagine my surprise when I found that I had been short-changed to the tune of $5!

Upon questioning this apparently innocent error, I was told that there was a $5 charge for sitting down. I pointed out that this charge was not shown on the price list and acordingly cancelled the transaction, took my money back and honoured Tsui Wah a few steps along the road with my custom. From the conversation behind Ebeneezer's counter, it was obvious that I was not the first person to have done this on that day alone.

Of course, I am not suggesting that my reader falls into either of the first two-mentioned categories of Ebeneezer customer, but if he (or she) does visit Ebeneezers, then he (or she) should check the bill more carefully than usual.

Seaman Stains

There are 419 scams, there are directory scams, and there is franchising.

Dress yourself up in a manufactured qualification, such as CFE (Certified Franchise Executive - surely you knew that!) from the IFA (International Franchise Association), add a few more pay-as-you go "qualifications" such as fellowship of the Institute of Directors (yes, you can become a "Fellow", just like with a real qualification), from£360 p.a., and membership of the Insitute of Marketing (from£130 p.a.) and the Institute of Export ("from only £67.50 p.a."), so in total no exams and about as much cost as parking a car in Hong Kong for a couple of months, and what have you got?

Yes, you have got "Professor" Roy Seaman of the renowned Franchise Development Services Limited, in business since 1981.(This is "Professor" as in Honorary Professor of Beijing Normal University's International Franchise Academy, which somehow fails to get a mention on the university's Wikipedia entry (fix that, Roy!), perhaps because it is really "based in Zhuhai (Guangdong) in partnership with the renowned Beijing Normal University". Ho, hum.)

So, armed with your curious title and your paid-for paper, what next? Why not send out some letters to random people and see what transpires? Such as:

"Following our previous correspondence via the UKTI ..."

err ... what correspondence? I've never heard of you before.

"... we thought that you would like to know that further FDS offices have now been established in the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, Australia and New Zealand. This is (sic) an addition to our well established offices here in the United Kingdom and in Spain. We are now planning to award a Master Franchise for Hong Kong."

Isn't just one "well established" overseas office after 31 years something of an indictment of your own franchising skills? And you picked Iraq and Pakistan ahead of Hong Kong? You think Iraq is more interested in brands than Hong Kong?
 

"Yours sincerely, Professor Roy Seaman, CFE"

Good luck, Roy.

All Roads Lead To Parish

What happened to turning the othe cheek, you cnuts?

Cut The Crap

Mixed doubles in tennis is a curious concept. Indeed, so are all the other doubles combos. They seem to exist solely to provide a way for tennis rabbits to stay in a tournament longer than the first round. Or maybe they are there to let the real players have a rest.

Watching the mixed doubles final of the Australian Open (for as long as it took to finish my drink and go, having shown up at my favourite sports bar thinking that the proper tennis was going to start at 1.30), I was struck by an interesting innovation. (Maybe it's not new, but I don't normally watch joke tennis.)Whenever a game got to deuce, the next point was the deciding point, as if to say, enough is enough, we know no one really wants to watch this stuff, so let's just play one more point and move on. The real entertainment will be along shortly.

What a jolly good idea, I thought, and why not take it to its logical conclusion? Why not apply it to women's tennis and, instead of just having a deciding point when it is 40-40, why not do it at the very beginning of the match and make each women's match be decided on a single point? And we could get rid of the arguments about paying women tennis players the same as men because, as Charlie Sheen said when asked why he paid women for sex, we wouldn't be paying them to play, but to just go away.

It's Unofficial!

I am in receipt of the Hong Kong Bar Association circular number 113/12, sent by one Frederick Chan "to all members and associate members".

Aside from the adoption of American spelling when referring to an award to the "Honorable" Justice Bokhary (my copy of the Oxford dictionary clearly refers to this as the American version of "honourable" - when did the Bar change over, and was it covered by a circular?), I am intrigued by the announcement of a "joint" and "unofficial" religious service which will be organised "as with (sic) previous years" to mark the opening of the legal year 2103 2013.

The jointness remains unexplained (with whom is the service being jointly organised?) as does the phenomenon of an unofficial service being announced officially, to wit under cover of an official Bar Association circular. And despite the circular being addressed to all members and associate members, only full members, albeit all of them, are invited to the unofficial service. Why are associate members being advised of the service only to be told that they are not invited? So many questions - so little time.

Walk A Mail In My Shoes

Has the Daily Mail been reading this blog? Or did it just take them longer to cut through the crap?

Britain's Prime Minister, David Cameron, has got in on the act, saying, "She clearly loved her job, loved her work, cared deeply about the health of her patients ...".

Err ... how is all that so clear to you, Dave? Maybe she did (love her job, etc.) and maybe she didn't. Or maybe she ckufing hated it - looking after toffs, being underpaid for it, and being berated by the hospital for the supposed slip-up even though she wasn't the one to give away any information. Or maybe she just thought life as an immigrant in Britain was sh1t generally. Even worse than living there is anyway.

A Bit Rich

There's nothing like a good old British bandwagon to jump onto, is there, especially when it involves the royals, and even better if there can be a bit of colonial-bashing thrown in for good measure.

So ... a couple of Aussie radio chatshow hosts made a prank call to, shock, horror, the hospital where Catherine Middleclass, Britain's most famous social climber, was feeling a bit poorly. The expensive private hospital had, unfortunately, not spent its high fees on training with the result that the nurse on reception was somewhat less well prepared to filter calls than the average Hong Kong secretary (or nurse) is. She therefore put the call through to someone else who spilled the detailed beans about how poorly Ms Middlebrow was, and much hilarity ensued. Three days later, the switchboard girl (note: not the person who divulged all the information) topped herself and hilarity was replaced by finger-pointing.

Being better versed in PR than in staff training, the hospital, the King Edward VII Hospital for Privileged Cnuts, got its defence out quickest, in fact too quickly to get all its tenses and punctuation right, thus :

“It is with very deep sadness that we confirm the tragic death of a member of our nursing staff, Jacintha Saldanha. Jacintha has worked at the King Edward VII Hospital for more than four years, she was an excellent nurse and a well respected and popular member of staff with all her colleagues.
We can confirm that Jacintha was recently the victim of a hoax call to the hospital. The hospital had been supporting her throughout this difficult time.”

Note the cunning piece of linkage slipped in with the effect of suggesting the death was indeed caused by the hoax call (and not by, say, any lack of training by the hospital, or the hospital perhaps giving the nurse sh1t for the slip-up, or any personal factors that might have made the nurse take her life), and therefore, coincidentally, that the hospital was not to blame. Attack is the best form of defence, as they say.

Hmm... the hospital "had been supporting her throughout this difficult time". Clearly, they had been doing this about as well as they trained her in the first place. Or perhaps their support had consisted of telling her how badly she had screwed up and they were the ones to push her over the edge. We may never know.

Hello, Cheeky

Susan Boyle is making headlines again, with a fantastic new Twitter hashtag.

Well, you wouldn't want to look at the front, would you?