Anglican feet in mouth over loan company

[Youssuf Ramadan]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23433955  welby vs wonga

The tl;dr version: Earlier this week, the Anglican church leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby decided to rail against payday loan sharks Wonga.com who charge massive interest rates for their loans, and said that the church would force them out of business by competing against them. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23459932

It later turns out that The church of England is an investor in Wonga.

Twats.  :roll:

Wonga row: Archbishop of Canterbury 'embarrassed' over Church funds


The Archbishop of Canterbury said he was "embarrassed" and "irritated" that the Church of England invested indirectly in online lender Wonga.
It comes after the Most Reverend Justin Welby told Wonga the Church would try to force it out of business by helping credit unions compete against the firm.
But the Church later said it invested in funds that provided money for Wonga.
Archbishop Welby told the BBC he wanted the Church's investment rules to be reviewed following the row.
Lambeth Palace said an independent inquiry would be launched into how "this serious inconsistency" occurred.
The amount of Church money indirectly invested in Wonga was about £75,000 out of investments totalling £5.5bn, according to the archbishop.
"It shouldn't happen, it's very embarrassing, but these things do happen and we have to find out why and make sure it doesn't happen again," Archbishop Welby told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
He said Church investment managers "didn't pick up" that they had put funds in a "pooled investment vehicle" which, through its investments, had bought into Wonga.
Real world

The Church's Ethical Investment Advisory Group "recommends against investment" in companies which make more than 3% of their income from pornography, 10% from military products and services, or 25% from other industries such as gambling, alcohol and high interest rate lenders.
The Church also "reserves the right" not to invest in companies with "unacceptable" management practices, according to its website.
Archbishop Welby said the 25% level for firms which deal in high interest rate lending was "probably too high" and he would ask the advisory group to review it.
"I think we have to review these levels and make sure that we are consistent between what we're saying and what we're doing," he said.
But he said it is difficult to decide exactly which businesses are unethical, giving hypothetical examples of a clothes company which makes socks for the military or a hotel which provides pornography through the TVs in its rooms.
He said the Church had to operate in the "real world", adding: "If you exclude any contact with anything that directly or indirectly at any point gets you anywhere bad, you can't do anything at all."
Payday firms offer short-term loans, often at high interest rates, and have been accused of leading people into more debt.
Archbishop Welby said he did not want to "drive legal payday lenders out of business" if that left people in deprived areas with no choice but to use "loan sharks".
This week, Archbishop Welby told Total Politics magazine he had met Wonga boss Errol Damelin and had "bluntly" told him "we're not in the business of trying to legislate you out of existence; we're trying to compete you out of existence".

Mr Damelin, in response, said he was "all for better consumer choice".
But, after the archbishop's comments were widely reported, Financial Times journalists looked into the Church's own investments and discovered links with Wonga.
The paper reported that the Church's pension fund, which claims to explicitly ban firms involved in payday lending, had invested in US venture capitalists Accel Partners - a company that led Wonga fundraising in 2009.
Archbishop Welby, a former oil industry financial executive who sits on the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, has previously lobbied for a cap on high interest rates charged by loan companies.
BBC religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott said the archbishop accepted that taking on payday lenders was a risky project which might not work.
But our correspondent said news that the Church had invested in funds that provided money for Wonga had "raised the stakes even further" and meant Archbishop Welby's plan "has to succeed".
Jonathan Bartley, of religious think tank Ekklesia, said the Church's policy was to make the most of its investments while "minimising harm".
"A better way of doing it would perhaps be to see the investments as part of the Church's mission, rather than an add-on, and saying actually we'll try and do good with our money," he said.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

So churches are basically investment houses for gawd.. I'm pretty sure there's some prohibition against it in some scriptures, but let's not split hairs, huh?

[Jason78]

ROFLMAO!

[stromboli]

I'd rather they were in bed with loan sharks that owning hospitals. Now there is some white collar crime.

[Colanth]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23433955  welby vs wonga

"It shouldn't happen, it's very embarrassing, but these things do happen and we have to find out why

How about because, like a lot of other CEOs, he had no clue what his organization was doing?

But he said it is difficult to decide exactly which businesses are unethical, giving hypothetical examples of a clothes company which makes socks for the military or a hotel which provides pornography through the TVs in its rooms.
He said the Church had to operate in the "real world", adding: "If you exclude any contact with anything that directly or indirectly at any point gets you anywhere bad, you can't do anything at all."

So if being ethical is difficult, we have 2 choices - do nothing at all or do what's expedient (IOW, forget about ethics).  Nice to know that religion, as explained by the leader of one of the largest religions, is bullshit.

Archbishop Welby, a former oil industry financial executive

Well.  We certainly can't argue with him, can we?  We all know how trustworthy and ethical the oil industry is, don't we?

Oops.