The JPMorgan source, who insists the bank should not have been liable at all, says, "We were willing to roll the dice on $2 billion versus $5 billion, but not $2 billion versus $10 billion".
The Chamber report says Saipem shouldn't have been held liable at all, even though it knew the company it was buying was hip-deep in bribery allegations.
It's like breathing in nitrous oxide, making you feel liable at any moment to float away.
I remember him as a kind of a dormant literary volcano – projecting a distinct air of danger, wreathed in cigar smoke, liable at any minute to erupt with a flow of molten judgments.
But my perky polite dam is perilously close to bursting after a weekend of reporting T-shirts with slogans that say, amongst other things, 'Keep Calm and Rape A Lot'. My sense of humour is liable, at any moment, to up it and say 'Luce, how am I supposed to work under these conditions?' It's been quite a week.
In a continent where there is too often a mere doffing of the hat to democracy and which is liable at any moment to be subsumed in anarchy, South Africa emerges from its bitter history with a much higher level of general happiness than almost any other country in the world.
What realistic hope could Ronnie have had — given also that he was laden with debt, on the run from Britain, and liable at any time to have his cover blown — of seeing his fantasy project signed, sealed, and delivered, and himself the triumphant winner on a white horse, riding away with his loot?
It had to be, for he was liable at any time to be clubbed on the head by an ill-disposed neighbour or eaten alive by a marauding monster, and these are conditions of life that do not make for lethargy.
His brilliant debut, Forgetting Elena (1973), reads the gay social and sexual rituals of New York's Fire Island in terms of the parallel rituals of 10th-century Japanese court life, "idle and gossipy", "profoundly hierarchical if superficially egalitarian", where decorous social behaviour contrasted with brutal sensuality, and ethics were liable at any time to be overruled by aesthetics.
What realistic hope could Ronnie have had given also that he was laden with debt, on the run from Britain, and liable at any time to have his cover blown of seeing his fantasy project signed, sealed, and delivered, and himself the triumphant winner on a white horse, riding away with his loot?
Denmark maintains military conscription for which all men become liable at age 18.
