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hendren global group stock fraud watch Any doubt over who calls the shots at Britain's part-nationalised banks has been dispelled by the fate of Stephen Hester. The RBS chief executive has been forced out at the behest of George Osborne. Forget the arms-length paraphernalia of the UKFI holding company. When ministers want the bailed-out banks to do something, they do it. That's as it should be, since the state (not the "taxpayer" as the media constantly intones) currently owns 81% and 39% of RBS and Lloyds TSB respectively. The problem is what they want to do with them - which is sell them off fast, regardless of the loss to the public purse or the damage to the economy. The chancellor is driven by a mixture of unbending ideology and raw electoral calculation. He and David Cameron are determined to start the largest privatisations in Britain's history by the end of 2014 - just in time for a 2015 election. The idea is to engineer a "Tell Sid" 1980s-style Thatcherite handout to the right kind of voters, while ensuring that the heresy of publicly owned banks is consigned to the nightmares of the 2008 market meltdown. Hester, who now stands to pocket an extra £5.6m after more than 40,000 RBS workers have lost their jobs, was insufficiently gung-ho for the scale of early sell-off Osborne regards as critical to Tory fortunes. His successor will get the message. Next week Osborne is expected to set out the kind of discounts he plans to offer for Lloyds shares. He's also toying with the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange's plan for a wider share giveaway. For the Tory leadership, it's a trade-off between the appearance of a public windfall and the risk of being seen again to stuff the pockets of the better-off as living standards plummet. In reality, it will be a fraud against the public and an attack on genuine economic recovery. The Brown government paid well over the odds to prevent the collapse of RBS and Lloyds in 2008. Now, Cameron and Osborne show every sign of

Interview: opportunism keeps Cube leader on upward course Myanmar has seemingly swung from being a martial communist state to a semi-democratic capitalist darling, with foreign investors scrambling for a foothold, in the blink of an eye. But is the southeast Asian state ready for perhaps the most bourgeois of sports, golf? That is the hope of Cube Capital, a London and Hong Kong-based boutique with a history of taking counter-intuitive bets, and which claims to have been the first western house to have entered Myanmar after sanctions were lifted in 2012. Cube is financing a golf villa development, having already made 20 per cent-plus returns from a more traditional 15-home villa park and a head office development. "There is no equity or bond market [in Myanmar]," says Francois Buclez, chief executive and chief investment officer of Cube. "There is public equity traded in Singapore, around three or four stocks, but their valuation is seven times book because that is all there is and everyone wants to buy them. "You can do private equity, but there is no proven or tested management team in Myanmar, or real estate [where] you don't need a management team, you just need a construction team. And in this market whatever you build will be taken out." Cube provides first lien finance for the developments, and Mr Buclez, a former Crédit Agricole and Credit Suisse First Boston banker, is critical of those who only view emerging markets through the prism of equity investing. "In emerging markets people dream about equity, they always want to make five, seven, 10 times their money, but they end up making 10 per cent. They forget that in these markets you can get a 20 per cent return with a protected asset class." To Mr Buclez, the real estate route also avoids arousing the ire of the local populace, unlike some sectors of the economy. "We tend to avoid natural resources in emerging markets. Typically a local will resent a foreigner milking the natu