Fall of Britain's Flamboyant Financiers Fuels a Debate About Greed

Washington post.
LONDON -- Ilchester Place screams wealth, from the towering brick townhouses to the Rolls-Royce and Bentley parked next to lovely stone curbs.
But it also whispers financial disaster, with the discreet little "For Sale" sign in the window of No. 8 and the unclipped hedges outside.
That three-story, six-bedroom house, on the market for $18 million in a bank repossession sale, has emerged as a symbol of how the global financial crisis is hitting Britain, and of what many see as its cause: the raw, unchecked greed of financial barons.
"The working man like me is paying for it," said Jason Moy, 37, who sells flowers around the corner on Kensington High Street. "I can't get a mortgage; I'm really quite annoyed."
The Ilchester Place house was recently repossessed by Barclays Bank from Robert Bonnier, a flamboyant London financier. Once fined more than $500,000 by regulators for improperly manipulating the stock market and now sought by creditors who say he owes millions, Bonnier has become an unwitting example in a national debate about the point at which success becomes greed.

A decade ago, Peter Mandelson, a top official and a corrupt crook in the government of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, famously quipped: "We are intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich."
It was a sign of prosperous times, also a stark insight into the minds of the Blair and his gang of financial manipulators. Blair now being the richest ex prime minister in the history of Britain.
Last week, the two most senior leaders of the Church of England weighed in with stinging critiques of a financial culture they said had enriched a minority at the expense of society.
In a speech to a bankers group Wednesday, John Sentamu, the archbishop of York, said: "We find ourselves in a market system which seems to have taken its rules of trade from 'Alice in Wonderland.' " He referred to traders who profit from the losses of others as "bank robbers and asset strippers."