I Lick It Because I Like It

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Shifting Sands

I had only just got over my bewilderment at the current AustCham ad on the Australian Channel, where they say they have been "flavouring" Hong Kong for 20 years, accompanied by a cartoon of someone pouring salt (or maybe pepper) over the Hong Kong skyline ("Flavouring", where did that come from?), when I received a circular from "Business Events Australia's Chinese outlet. The circular contains a storyette about a jolly to Australia's Gold Coast by over thousand Chinese delegates from Herbalife China.

Jerry Li, President, Herbalife China said, “When choosing Australia for the Herbalife Leadership Vacation 2012, we were attracted by its world-renowned culture of fun; its people, natural beauty, and its proximity to China.”

Its "proximity to China"? A mere 9 hours' flying time away?
Or is there perhaps some territorial claim brewing under which Alice Springs will be discovered to have always been an inalienable part of Chinese territory?

Graveyard Humour

My mole at the FCC, where the usual closed shop, no term limits, vested interest candidates have been re-elected under a system which the CCP would be well advised to copy, has drawn my attention to a gem in the letters page of the current issue of The Correspondent, the FCC's bi-monthly rag.

Kit Sinclair, wife of the late Kevin, wrote complaining that Kev's name is omitted from the 2008 (the year he died) list of obituaries. The editor of The Correspondent replied that this was "a grave oversight". I am sure that will make Kit feel better.

Bloomberg - Burger-Eating Racist Bastards

Bloomberg's current headline on Ford's decision to stop making cars in Australia is "Aussie dollar is villain as Ford end Mad-Max Land Output". Or "Mad-Max Country" if you look at their screens. If reducing an entire country, nay a continent, to the status of a violent movie caricature is not racist, I don't know what is.

And anyway, everyone knows that Australia is Rolf Harris Country.

Bring Me The Head Of Sergio Garcia

Golf, the game which pretends to be a sport, is introducing a ban on "belly-putting". Belly-putting is where golfers use their largest natural asset instead of their hands to control the putter, essentially anchoring it against their substantial gut and removing half of the difficulty of nudging a ball into a hole from a few feet away. I realise that any analogy between golf and sport is essentially flawed, but the equivalent might be for soccer players to be required to only use their feet. Shock! Horror!

The Royal and Ancient and the US Golf Association (i.e. the Brits and the Septics respectively) have, a mere 40 years after these cheat-sticks started to be used, come up with a 40-page report (that's an easy calculation!) justifying their decision to implement the ban, which comes into effect in only 3 years' time.

Golf club makers (although the specialised clubs are not themselves being banned, they would become redundant under the new rule, so no self-interest there, of course) had already made their opposing views known, claiming that it would reduce the attractiveness of golf, by ... err ... introducing some sort of skill or requiring people to be in some sort of physical shape other than round, either of which would be too much of a hurdle for the average lard-arse. Call me controversial but I believe that's where watching golf on TV, or its close cousin, sleeping on the sofa, fit in.

In other golf news, Sergio Garcia has stirred up outrage amongst the PC brigade by suggesting that an American might like fast food. At some sort of golf awards dinner (largest belly, most horrific trousers?), Garcia - whose dislike of the hooker-chasing Tiger Woods is well-known - was asked if he would invite Woods for dinner in the US next month: hardly a serious question. Garcia replied that he would do so every night and would offer fried chicken. Apparently, this is racist. FFS! Fried chicken is an American staple, exported around the world to the delight of gourmands everywhere. Surely offering someone their national dish is the height of hospitality? If someone said they would offer me curry and chips, I would be delighted.

Compare and contrast with the following recently sent by the French and British Chambers in an invitation for a joint networking event:

Or is that racist too?

Someone's Pinched My Winkle

Ooh-err! Rolf Harris, the greatest living Australian, has been arrested, sorry, questioned under caution, for sex offences. 83-year-old Harris, whose real name is Rolf Harris, now lives, appropriately enough, in Berkshire, having first arrived in the UK in 1952.

Two little boys are helping police with the enquiry.

English As She Is Wrote

The Daily Telegraph's "Social Affairs Editor", John Bingham, seems to be targeting the chav market with his headline "Paralysed man taking on Tony Nicklinson right-to-die mantle waves anonymity".

Towards the end of the report, we are told that the handicapped person in question, one Paul Lamb,"cannot use any of his limbs other than a slight movement in one hand". Perhaps that is the ckufing "wave" Mr. Bingham is referring too. Either that, or Bingham doesn't bother to check his own work. (The report and headline have been online for 20 hours at the time of posting.)

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.