Criticism
Macquarie Group through its subsidiary Macquarie Equipment Rentals has allegedly been perpetrating a Telco finance scam. Macquarie Equipment Rentals has sued over 300 victims of the scam which involves bundling a finance equipment contract with a contract from a small telecommunications company, often obscuring that the finance contract exists.
The scam involves the telecommunications company promising free equipment such as Plasma TVs, while offering a lower cost phone deal that offsets the cost of the equipment. The victim is then tricked into signing two contracts with the true costs often hidden, whilst being verbally promised that they will be free. The telecommunications company is paid an upfront fee by the finance company, and sometime later disappears. The victim is then left with an inflated finance company lease that requires the victim to pay often tens of thousands of dollars for equipment that in reality costs a fraction of the price.
In January 2009, over 60 people demonstrated outside the Macquarie's office in Vancouver, BC, Canada. They protested Macquarie's involvement in the controversial Gateway Program which they claimed would dramatically increase greenhouse gas emissions, local pollution, and sprawl.
The company's high margins and profits, and the rewards for its executives and shareholders, have seen the Australian media label the bank "The Millionaire Factory".
Read more about this topic: Macquarie Group
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)