Gosling's Grouse: Out of all proportion

GOSLING'S GROUSE

How corrupt is our industry? I use the word ‘corrupt' because this is surely the only inference that someone outside of the sector could take, from the inducement and bribery rules within financial services.

But the bribery rules, and their ‘younger brother’ the inducement rules started life as a set of regulations to combat bribery in other industries. The original inspiration was the arms industry, which even someone with a superficial knowledge of the subject would understand could suffer from corruption. We also work in a very competitive industry – there are in excess of 30,000 mutual funds available for sale across Europe, there are now other 10,000 exchange traded products, and, in the UK alone, there are over 6,500 structured products, according to the PureResearch Group. I hav...