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Cantor's sacked 'Posh Bird' hits back
Robert Lea7 Mar 2008
A City trader who was sacked by Cantor Fitzgerald for revealing life in her office as macho, drink-fuelled and racist has hit back.
Venetia Thompson, known at the interdealer broker as Posh Bird, was fired after she wrote an article for The Spectator magazine lifting the lid on life — invariably funded on expenses — at Cantors.
Writing in the Daily Telegraph today, two weeks after she was first suspended, she says: “Pulling a colleague off their chair in a headlock, calling someone Ferg' or wiki' [terms of racial abuse], hurling a keyboard in fury or getting so drunk at lunchtime that you have to have your car keys wrestled away from you are, it seems, all acceptable forms of behaviour. Writing about it is apparently gross misconduct.”
Thompson, 23, says she was disciplined by Cantors after the firm's head of human resources took her to task for her references in the article to the casual racial abuse she had witnessed in her job. Today, she insists such abuse was more prevalent than she had initially disclosed.
Public-school girl Thompson who happily admits to also being known at the firm as Airbags — “on account of my breasts” — was also accused of fabricating anecdotes that chronicled her experience of drunken, sleep-deprived traders, whom she refers to as “marauding barrow boys” and “my much-loved Essex boys”.
She tells of one “six-hour lunch” at which a colleague told the sommelier to keep the wine flowing so long as it was under £600 a bottle.
Thompson, who admits to being drunk at her desk at 7am, breaking off trades with clients to be sick and to falling asleep in the staff bathroom in the afternoon, says: “I was addicted to the adrenalin, the noise, the aggression and, of course, the entertaining.”
She now admits her decision to pen the original article was “my City suicide note”. Cantors declined to comment.
