Ramblings

I’m afraid I took an instant dislike to A. He was going to shake up our Primary Markets offering. I was suffering from a cold and in a bad mood at our first meeting, and everything irritated me: the faux deep voice to project gravitas, the hair too long for a man his age, and the plummy and over-precise diction which put me in mind of Robert Maxwell. I thought him self-important, overbearing and full of bluster.

He also arrived at the wrong end of my career. We had a small but profitable business which ticked over nicely without much hassle, and I wasn’t looking for disruption or an ambitious expansion in the last couple of years before my retirement. Further, my colleague and I had always been sharply focused on the bottom line: the greater part of our remuneration was profit related. Whereas A, I sensed, wanted to expand, to run a large department. To build an empire, to be The Man.

I was charged with reporting my views back to our chief executive. Suppressing my personal view of A, I voiced enthusiasm for the area of the market in which he operated, hedged with a scepticism about his projected figures, and a suspicion that the revenue they were currently producing would not support the team he proposed to bring. I also expressed concern about new recruits who didn’t buy in to our firm’s founding principle of low basic salaries coupled with a good profit share.

Alarmed that our comfortable little vessel was about to be buffeted by the winds of change, I arranged a discreet lunch with a market contact who had been a competitor for many years, but whom I had always liked and respected. He had worked with A, and I wanted the lowdown. He was kind enough to help: A worked extremely hard, had a very loyal assistant – fair enough – and expected his staff to be available for phone calls in the evening, at weekends and on holiday. This last was a red flag: I had always maintained a clear boundary between work and home life, and wasn’t going to change that policy late in my career.

Notwithstanding my reservations, A was soon recruited to our firm with a small team which soon started to grow. He was not installed as my boss, but tried to include me as part of the team. I was wary of this: I had witnessed enough office politics to know how easy it was for others to appropriate your work and profit contribution. So when a group photo shoot had been arranged, and an emissary came to my desk to invite me to attend. I declined. My suspicions were confirmed when the photo emerged with A beaming proprietorially behind his team, positioned to take credit for anything good that happened.

We settled down to an uneasy equilibrium, where my colleague and I working alongside his team in contiguous but separate areas, with occasional interactions. A would sometimes come to confer with the team member on the desk adjacent to mine, and park his ample rear on the end of my desk. Perhaps he just needed to sit down, but I interpreted it as dominant, territorial behaviour. My passive-aggressive response was to place a couple of folders on that end of my desk, so that when he sat there I would discover some need to access them, and he would have to stand up and apologise.

I realise I’m not painting a flattering picture of myself: a stick-in-the-mud, a curmudgeon, a poor team player, defensive, lazy…also somewhat envious of A. Although some years older than I was, he had an undiminished appetite for business, while I was winding down to a comfortable retirement – and looking forward especially to being released from the tyranny of the alarm clock. He was certainly no fool, and understood his market well. He did indeed work very hard. And his team was starting to bring in some deals.

Yet my refusal to work with A was not based solely on my animus towards him. My impression that he was an empire builder and glory seeker more than a businessman proved well founded: he saw each deal they brought in as an opportunity to enlarge the team, thus ramping up the cost base and the ongoing risk to the firm – a firm built on financially sustainable, low-risk business, and which had been kept tightly staffed.

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Thursday 7th May 2015 was General Election day in the UK. At about 11am A came into the dealing room and addressed his colleague on the desk next to mine. “Vote early, vote twice, that’s my motto!” he declared. He elaborated: he had received a polling card at his country seat, and another at his London pied-à-terre, and had cast a vote in both constituencies. “You know that’s illegal, don’t you?” his colleague responded.

I couldn’t believe my ears. My first reaction was anger. Of course we all have opinions on politics, but these are less important than our precious but increasingly fragile democracy. I was furious that he would abuse his right to vote this way. But I was also astonished that he would boast about it, as if expecting approval. Not only that, to do so within my hearing – when he knew how I regarded him – seemed to have handed me a loaded gun.

I brooded about this for a few days. Should I shop him to the Electoral Commission? I didn’t have enough detail: I didn’t know either of the constituencies in which he said he had voted, and his was quite a common name. Perhaps my gun was loaded with blanks. But a few days later I was browsing one of my favourite features in the Financial Times – Lucy Kellaway’s wise and entertaining “agony aunt” column called Dear Lucy – and I saw an opportunity to air my complaint.

So I sent Lucy this email:

“I heard a colleague, a senior figure in the investment bank where I work, boasting to another that he had voted twice in the general election: once from his country home and once from his London pied-à-terre. This annoyed me and also worried me that his casual disregard for the law could end up being seriously damaging for our firm. Should I report him to the Electoral Commission, or to compliance, or let sleeping dogs lie? Bond trader, 58 (male)”

And blow me, the FT published it a few days later under the heading “The boast of a double vote in the general election”. Lucy’s advice was sensible, as always:

“As you are a 58-year-old bond trader, I am guessing you have been in your bank for a while, know the whereabouts of all buried bodies and know a thing or two about this particular senior figure.

What is he like? Is he just the sort of slippery, dodgy person who you would expect to play fast and loose not only with democracy, but with the bank’s shareholders, staff and customers? If yes, the answer is easy. Shop him to everyone. To the Electoral Commission, to compliance and to anyone else who comes to mind. You have already all but shopped him to me and to readers of the Financial Times, so all that remains is to complete the job. What is the worst that could happen? Possibly he will cut up rough, compliance will be too cowed to take him on, and the Electoral Commission too bureaucratic to follow through. You could end up out of a job.

But would you really care? You have more of your trading career behind you than ahead of you, and so can surely afford to take risks. Unless you have a staggeringly expensive lifestyle, I doubt if you are dependent on your monthly pay cheque to cover the mortgage. That means you are freer than most people to do whatever your conscience tells you. Most bond traders do not retire a hero to anyone other than their bank manager. You have the chance to leave having done something brave and splendid.

If, on the other hand, this senior man had previously struck you as rather a good thing for the bank, then you ought to deal with it differently. In that case, you should take him on yourself. Tell him that you overheard him boasting about voting twice, and how much it bothers you. He will probably be embarrassed and bluster. He may be furious, too. Almost certainly he would dearly love to fire you, but your knowledge of his crimes against the ballot box would make this tricky for him. If he tried to get rid of you, then you would have a fascinating story about what really transpired.

What would you gain from confronting him? You would teach him a lesson. But being pulled up by someone beneath you in the pecking order on a moral and legal matter is something that happens so rarely that he would remember it forever. It is most unlikely he would offend in the same way again.”

So the ball was back in my court. The problem remained that I lacked the details I needed to make a persuasive report. But leaving that aside, I would have hesitated to stick the knife in. Sure, I didn’t like A, but did I really need to be vindictive – more than I already had been?

Among many online comments under Lucy’s reply, one emphasised the risk of losing my job if I reported A. I replied that Lucy’s assumption that I was financially ready for retirement was accurate: I had no interest in gambling, yachts or racehorses, and had not been through a divorce. As I put it, I was happily looking forward to ringing the Bell on my career.

In the event, in the following few months my employer concluded that A’s business was not making enough money to pay its way, and invited the team to seek opportunities elsewhere.

Later it transpired that reporting A’s transgression was unlikely to achieve anything anyway, if the 2017 election was any guide: over a thousand complaints about alleged double voting resulted in just one conviction. Nobody cares, apparently. So don’t worry A, your secret is safe. More or less.