Why do we hate Banks?
Soutpiel Safari
John & Jenny
Thu 21 Oct 2010 10:30
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For this trip across 17 national borders, we have to have
a Carnet de Passage which is issued by the RAC. In effect, this is a guarantee
in favour of national Customs Authorities that if the vehicle enters a country
but does not leave, either though being sold, stolen or written off in a crash,
the RAC will pay the Customs Duty due. To give this guarantee, the RAC
needs to have a guarantee of payment from the Owner that if a call is made
against the Carnet, the Owner will foot the bill!
The countries through which we shall be travelling all
require a coverage of 150% of the vehicle's value and this is the value of the
Carnet. There are several ways of providing this security to the RAC but
we have chosen a Bank Guarantee from Barclays. I cleared this in principle with
Barclays in May and made my application 4 weeks ago yesterday. I then had
to provide a statement of assets and liabilities and sign a counter-guarantee
for Barclays, which basically said that if their guarantee is called, I'll pay
them!
The guarantee was formally approved over two weeks ago but
still has not been received by the RAC.
At the beginning of this week it still had not been issued
and was sitting on a desk in Manchester. I managed to obtain an assurance that
it would be sent out that day, but where is it?
This is causing a problem now as, quite
reasonably, the RAC will not start preparing the Carnet until they receive
the guarantee but they originally stated that they need 4 weeks for the
process. This is now the Critical Path and could delay our start
date.
In my business life I dealt with the issue of Bank
Guarantees on an almost daily basis. I must say that the Saudi American
Bank usually managed to issue guarantees the same day and that was 12 years
ago. What price progress?
The UK government has just published their "spending
review" listing enormous cuts in public expenditure brought about to save the
nation from bankruptcy. The UK public hold the Banks principally
responsible for the dire state of the Nation's fortunes and the public
opinion of Bankers (or ?ankers) is at an all-time low, especially as they
all want to now pay themselves mega bonuses while the rest of us bail them out
from our tax payments. Who loves a Banker?
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