Weird scenes inside the gold mine (everybody's doin' it, doin' it)

[DFW]

Here in Germany, the big banks are up to the same kind of shenanigans that the banks are
in the States, and their directors and high-ups are playing the same hand-in-the-cookie-jar
game as the board members on the States.

The biggest German bank (by far) had a board of directors and a board advisory committee of some
sort. They then had to justify their decision -making process, and it turned out that the ones
suggesting plans were the same ones who told the board members how to vote on them. For their
trouble, the board members were getting a "modest" 20 million euros apiece, which, even after
heavy German taxes, left them with about 8 million euros free and clear to play with. They are
now looking at a "stark" reduction of down to 10 million euros, but seeing as how they didn't do
much more than collect their money and rubber-stamp decisions laid before them, I guess they might
have had to admit that they were well-compensated, even at half the price. There is also some
re-structuring going on. Apparently the advisory committee is supplying some members of a newly
expanded board of directors.

This is far from my area of expertise, and I'm getting this from some people who have been given
the thankless task of coming up with an explanation as to why (or if) all this stuff has been legal.
The thing is, the chart of who controls what is so complex (presumably deliberately so) that it is
nearly impossible to make heads or tails of the real decision-making process. The only thing that
is sure is that there are a very few guys siphoning off a few hundred million a year into their own
pockets for doing, for most of the year, little more than breathing and voting for pre-determined
proposals a few times a year at meetings in hardship places like Monte-Carlo or Phuket. God only knows
what the people who benefit by their decisions are getting out of this situation, but I rather doubt
it's less.

Keep voting the right way, collect your money (now THAT'S what I call passing GO!), as long as you keep
yer fat trap shut about it, you keep your position..

Now, the authorities are getting curious as to how all this works. They might not like what they
find, and the public (not to mention the shareholders) might like it less--assuming there is anything
left for them to find. It's not like the handwriting hasn't been on the wall for a while now.

Who wants to bet that the German-speaking ex-pat community in Brazil, Thailand and Monaco is soon
to expand by a dozen or two well-heeled members?

(And here we thought it was only Wall Street and Zürich!)