Johnny B. Sinister, the American-born boss of global pharmaceutical giant Phoni Pharm. Inc., told the CBI conference that it is not just bankers who need to reform. He said: "If we fail to change things will not be pretty. And if you think you're exempt, you're wrong.”
Mr. Sinister, whose company recently paid a $1.8bn (£1.1bn) fine to the US government in September for misleading sales advice on one of its drugs, said, "People have had enough and the backlash is real."
“The public is tired of huge global companies like us regarding massive corporate malfeasance fines as a cost of business, and then just carrying breaking the law,” he said.
“They’re also tired of our price gouging. They’ve had enough of our lying about and hiding clinical data, just so we can get drugs of dubious benefit onto the market. They’ve had enough of us buying doctors and politicians to maintain the status quo and crush any chance of healthcare reform. They’ve had enough of executives like me, who are paid seven figure salaries for selling off the first world’s intellectual silverware to the Far East for the short term financial gain of themselves and their backers. And they’re fed up with the massive lay-offs and the resultant social costs that these off-shoring strategies and “slash and burn” mergers and takeovers are causing.”
“But we don’t really care”, Sinister admitted. “The public also knows that we’ll just carry on doing whatever we want anyway, because we are too big to be allowed to fail or to be stopped.”
The next speaker emphasized that the banking world agreed with Mr. Sinister’s perception of public antipathy.
“Greed is good,” said RBS’s Gordon Gecko (no relation), to a cheering audience, as he trousered a $100 million dollar bonus paid for out of public bail-out money...
Jack brings us tales from the real world of a similar gathering of the great and good here…
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