Jim Armitage: Red carpet treatment for oil barons shames London

These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others.

Those alleycat ethics might have been good enough for Groucho Marx, but they shouldn’t pass muster for London’s prime financial regulator.

The Financial Conduct Authority’s proposal to bend the Stock Exchange rules and allow Saudi Aramco to list a 5% sliver of itself here is an embarrassment to London.

Not only that, but it could pave the way for another humiliation of the kind we still recall from our experience with ENRC, the Kazakh oligarch-controlled miner that spectacularly crashed and burned, leaving UK pensioners’ savings scorched in its wake.

ENRC was allowed to list a minority stake because London had relaxed the insistence that at least a quarter of a company must be floated to qualify for a premium listing.

Things went badly wrong, but UK shareholders, with their tiny hold on the business, were left powerless.

That’s why the rules were subsequently tightened up. Yet now, just four years later, we are loosening them again.

Not only are the regulators flagging that they’ll waive the 25% rule, but they’re also going to allow the Saudi government to buy and sell bits to and from Aramco without asking London shareholders first. How’s that for a comforting investment prospect?

It’s not a surprise regulators are taking this easy-come-easy-go view. The government has decided that, post Brexit, we must become an anything-goes, caveat-emptor destination for foreign cash.

Theresa May and London Stock Exchange chief Xavier Rolet didn’t travel all the way to Riyadh earlier this year to discuss the price of camels.

They will have been promising the earth to win the Saudis’ business. Since then, they’ve doubtless been exerting strong pressure on the FCA to clear the regulatory decks and bring this float to London. To hell with the safeguards for the folk here left holding the shares.

The watchdog has done their bidding well.

Former education secretary Nicky Morgan’s post-sacking revival is to be welcomed.

An outspoken Remainer, she will be a critical friend to business, and hold Brexit ministers to account. The alternative, Jacob Rees-Mogg, was unthinkable.

I hear Aviva chief Mark Wilson was bopping around with his staff at Pride at the weekend.

Good on him for being the only FTSE 100 gaffer to do his bit, but better still for not crowing about it with wall-to-wall press releases and demands for media coverage. Turn up, have fun, go home. Spot on.