Herts County Council reveals it has £17 million in insolvent Icelandic bank which has frozen deposit

[IotasCat]

Glad I don't live there

sb699 they have to - it is for stuff like capital projects (rebuilding) and for bigger stuff that takes a long time to happen. say you had £25000 loan from your bank to pay for an extension but then your builder culdnt start for 3 months, you'd put it in a savings account too!

and teh council atx goes on all osrts of things - they have to prove what they want it for and they get money from elsewhere (central govt) too - it costs millions to run a huge county like HCC. you'd complain if your granny couldn't get social services or if your child couldnt go to school today cos they'd run out of money...

and iceland banks WERE good, seen as a solid investment by many many organisations. its all chnaged now

you prob wouldn't be so pissed off with them if they'd invested in a uk bank that had gone tits up

but the finance person in the council has a responsibility to invest in whichever institution is going to give the best returns

it probably seemed like a great decision at the time

hindsight, eh?

Most people's granny's can't get social services in Herts, actually. It's restricted to those in the most severe categories of need. And the council is trying to evict elderly people from sheltered housing and is evicting homeless people from another centre.

Despite having VERY high council tax and paying the directors £££££s for running failing departments, as I mentioned.

Round here the council bosses screw anyone in need, screw the tax payers and make sure there's plenty of cash going into their own back pockets.

The 'chief exec' of the council is paid more than £200,000, ffs. We could almost get TWO Gordon Browns for that (actually, rather not but YKWIM).

The finance director is probably on more than 100k as well. So forgive me for being pissed off he's just thrown away £17m of OUR money and will no doubt expect us ordinary taxpayers to stump up.

Head of HR gets £150k.

I like the leader of KCC, but some of the chief execs get paid huge amounts with pensions to match. Surely the finance people should face the axe over this, there have been warnings about Iceland for months.

More of them have been coming out of the woodwork all afternoon. Too much hope that the tolly incompetent treasurers will be sacked.Numerous people have been waring about the Icelandic bubble for at least a year - I had some money to invest a year ago and the Icelandic rates looked attractive - but less than 5 mins of googling warned me off. I am just an average punter, not an economist, but I went for a lower rate of interest in a proper institution. At least this has drawn people's attention to the useless bunch running their local authoities. And WHY should they have cash to invest? Obviously it should be held centraly by gvt and doled out as needed - if this had all been under the control on a central treasury the ridiculous over-exposure would have been evident. All those local authorities involved hould simply not be trusted with the money, and just have it paid out directly as needed, and dispense with their rubbish officials.

bolleaux

dorset too