So you see it has all worked out rather well in the end.A chapter is closed and we now offer a new beginning, new horizons, bigger and greater things….Oh all right then. Enough is enough and we agree to go quietly when suitable replacements are found.Yours apologetically, etc etc, signed in the chairman’s absence, squiggle, squiggle, PA to the chairman of National Westminster Bank.. Tony O’Reilly yesterday stepped down as chief executive of the US group HJ Heinz, turning over day-to-day control of the company to his leading lieutenant. The same cannot be said of that mob round at Barclays, who have not yet said how much their own parallel withdrawal from BZW is costing them.Now for the good news. The very fact that we are getting all this out of the way now will enable us to deliver substantial improvements in our performance in 1998 and thereafter – pounds 637m of improvement, to be precise.

You can’t say fairer than that, can you? As it turns out, these businesses were tying up a huge amount of capital – what we in banking call “weighted risk assets” – which is now available for use elsewhere. Given our record, you can surely rely on us to squander this money elsewhere now that it has been released Ha, ha! Only joking. By the way, this last item definitely wasn’t our fault, and as for the rest, that can all largely be blamed on NatWest Markets’ former chief executive, Martin Owen, who we have now fired.
We feel sure that you will give us credit, both for the speed with which we have grasped the nettle and disposed of these businesses, and for the openness with which we have detailed the damage. That includes everything, you understand – trading losses, restructuring charges, that wretched options mispricing business and a wacking great post budget adjustment to finance lease receivables, whatever they are. Totting up all the costs associated with our withdrawal from equities trading, we’ve arrived at a grand total of pounds 637m, which will be charged to group profits this year.

A personal letter to the shareholders of National Westminster Bank from the chairman Lord Alexander, and the chief executive, Derek Wanless Dear shareholder It looks bad, doesn’t it? But in fact it isn’t Actually it’s very good news for all of us really Let’s get the bad news over with first. The Egyptian government has co-opted fundamentalist preachers.The Christian fundamentalist right in America exerts its baleful influence over the Middle East. And whenan Arab scholar last year asked the Pope to apologise for the Crusades – the greatest act of ethnic cleansingand barbarism in the Middle East in a thousand years – he received only silence by way of reply.
Are extremists – the killers and the racists or the eccentrics – mere defects in the world of religion? Or arethey an inevitable part of it in the Middle East? I fear the latter.Perhaps it is time we recognised thispoison for what it is For there is nothing so hard as the rock of belief And nothing so potentially cruel.. And those who believe insuch total truths – to the extinction of other, invalid “truths” – live near their holy cities. Fundamentalists,after all, help rule Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan Sudan and – given the make-up of BenjaminNetanyahu’s cabinet – Israel as well. Is there a problem because there is no New Testament for two of these religions – no messageof “turning the other cheek”? Or because there was no renaissance in the Middle East? It would bepleasant to draw some coherent explanation.
Alas, I fear there may not be one Religion is about ultimate truth and faith.