Mike Jones an Expert Witness
Mike Jones, founding partner of Share Witness, will be known to many in the City having spent virtually his whole career and being heavily involved in City life. In this City Chronicles interview Mike discusses with ISITC Europe Director, Gary Wright, his early years in the City, leading up to Big Bang and the CREST development. It is quite a journey and encapsulates many of the key changes, which created the capital market we have today. It is a historical trip through his life and times populated with interesting anecdotes and descriptions of characters and firms in an age that we all look at in the rear-view mirror but are now disappearing from sight.
We start the journey with Mike’s entry into the City and early recollections of getting his first job. The attitudes of senior people and the partners of the Stockbrokers, to a young enthusiastic Mike Jones, which might leave people imagining a world that Dickens would describe. This was however the early sixties.
We take the Mike Jones story forward, discussing the technology that was used during his time at Stockbroker, Capel Cure Myers and the challenges of new technologies that were emerging that would change operations, businesses, and lives.
Big Bang or the deregulation of the Capital Markets in the UK meant that firms with partnerships were now being bought by Banks and other types of financial institutions. By October1984 the date that the Government legally changed the City, partnerships were no longer in situ, now it was corporate membership of the London Stock Exchange. Soon the London Stock Exchange itself, became no longer a membership organisation but a PLC. The City had been changed forever!
People also changed, many leaving the City with much fatter bank accounts. Unfortunately, with them left an enormous amount of knowledge and experience. In time this brain drain caused a massive hole across all firms within the market that was most sorely missed in the 1987 crash.
The settlement crisis begun in the early eighties with a boom of investors created from Government privatisations and the mountain of paper that built to an unworkable, immovable mess. This spawned a Stock Exchange replacement of the existing settlement system Talisman, to be replaced by the failed TAURUS. Mike talks about these times and the lead into the TAURUS replacement that was CREST!
Part One – Interviewed By Gary Wright, Director, ISITC Europe CIC
Viewing time 25 mins
Part Two – Interviewed by Gary Wright, Director, ISITC Europe CIC
Viewing time 26 mins
Philip Michael Thyer Jones (Mike Jones)
Having spent 40 years in stockbroking and investment management, Mike has spent over 10 years acting as an Expert Witness. He has been involved in 200 cases for 30 firms of solicitors, the FCA, and the Police. Cases include Suitability of investments, FCA Regulations, Unregulated Schemes, Fraud, Boiler Rooms, Insider Trading (the Tabernula Insider case), and Pension Fund scams.
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