The Great Savings and Pensions Scam. An A-Z Guide. Today K-L

K � Knighthoods. These are just one of the many honours Blair and Brown handed out so generously to the bankers who ruined Britain. There were 7 knighthoods, 5 CBEs, 7 life peerages and 4 OBEs. Only one of these scumbags has been stripped of his honour � Mr Goodwin. But why was he ever allowed to run a bank in the first place? About 6 years ago, I contacted the SFO and the Bank of England (BoE) offering to put them in touch with a former Deloittes manager who claimed he had documentation proving that, while at Deloittes, Fred Goodwin was largely responsible for defrauding the creditors of the BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International) of over �50m and so was not a fit person to run a bank. (Labour MPs Keith Vaz and Austin Mitchell should feel embarrassed, as they played a role in what happened). I even had a phone conversation with the chief legal counsel at the BoE. But he, of course, laughed off my concerns � after all, Fred was a good mate of Blair and Brown so not the sort of person who would do what the Deloittes manager claimed. Pity really, if that pompous, useless BoE windbag I spoke to had bothered to move his lazy overpaid arse, I might have saved British taxpayers about �45 billion!

L � Life expectancy. The good news is that we are living longer. The bad news is that most people aren�t able to save enough for their retirement. Many of us will work for 40 years and then have almost 30 years in retirement. This means we must save worryingly large amounts of money if we are to avoid ending our lives in pension poverty. With annuity rates approaching 3%, you�ll need about �1m in savings to get a retirement income of �30,000 a year above your state pension. But the pension industry siphons off so much of savers� money that few people will ever get anywhere near this amount. The average pension fund today is about �30,000 giving an annual income of just �900. We pay about five times as much in fees to our underperforming multimillionaire pension fund managers as they do in Denmark or Holland. About �200bn of the �800bn we have in pension savings are in �zombie funds� � which hardly grow but which pay huge fees to the companies that own them. Another �200bn or so are in misleadingly-named �with profits� funds. These allow the managers to withhold any profits and then after a few years to pocket these themselves. Britain�s pension industry is awash with greed, incompetence, overcharging, mis-selling and outright theft. We may be living longer, but few of us will have enough money to enjoy our extra years on the earth.