How we all get ripped off by the City

The behaviour that passes for perfectly normal in the financial industry - from massive pay awards for executives to cynical exploitation of customers - is shocking, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

It sometimes feels as though there is something intrinsically corrupt about everything. Today's papers are a case in point.

In the first two pages of the Evening Standard alone we learn that members of the House of Lords pocket up to £48,000 each a year in tax free expenses, money for which they never have to provide justifying receipts, and that Scotland Yard officers have recently managed to steal a whopping £1m from the tax payer via company issue American Express cards.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.