Canary Wharf - (AssoCIAted Mess): The treasury is in panic lockdown mode this weekend following the news that the First Sharia Banking Corporation of London has gone bust and is likely to need a whopping great big £50 billion hand-out just like the Northern Crock Bank in 2007.
"We've looked under Sheikh McTomb Raider's mattress and found a very big hole," Alistair Darling's spokesman said today.
The bank first showed signs of going belly-up when the Sheikh's UK bloodstock collateral suddenly went lame, became infertile and/or dropped dead in their stables last August.
Then all the signs of another BCCI fiasco appeared with Prime Monster Gorgon Brown bending over backwards to appease dodgy foreign potentates who had broken decades of treaties not to stone/lash/execute women and children in exchange for technical support in the hydrocarbons industry.
Several large international transactions linked to France's SocGen Bank and its national oil company ELF somehow patched up the gaping holes in the London institution's balance sheet.
And then little Jerome Kerviel got busted for the $7 billion scam that had been wallpapering over the kind of cracks normally found in subterranean tectonic plates.
A Treasury announcement is pencilled in for early this week when Alistair Darling will explain the need for UK taxpayers to embrace - with joy! - a new raft of Sharia-compliant bonds that have absolutely zero guarantee of letting investors get so much as their money back.
Our man in Kabulshit is apoplectic.
