Square Mile Bloggerati

The Rossoneri accepted the offer (they’re no mugs, them Italians) and Onyewu, who made the offer out of gratitude after spending all but one game of his debut season on the treatment table, will pick up no wages for the 2012-13 season.

The immediate reaction from the press was one of amazement and genuine delight that perhaps football, an industry so full of mercenary, money-guzzling, mindless shaggers that it gives bankers a good name, wasn’t as bad as we’d thought after all.

It’s a lovely idea but surely no more than that – after all, Onyewu had played just one competitive game for Milan and would have been hard pressed to squeeze an extra season out of the club under any other terms. And the man’s clearly feeling guilty as hell – surely the most surprising element to the whole story. We don’t expect footballers to connect the vast sums of cash they hoover up for their trough to any kind of responsibility beyond the odd need to fill up the Aston or pay off the WAG’s credit card after a week-long residency in Harvey Nicks.

Which brings us – circuitously, I’ll concede – to the City. When the Sunday Times released its annual Giving List in April, in which the UK’s 50 biggest charitable givers (relative to their wealth) are ranked, bankers and hedge fund managers featured prominently. Chris Hohn, founder of The Children’s Investment fund (TCI), topped the list with recent donations of £531.2m, and fellow hedgies Arpad Busson and Stanley Fink, along with ICAP chief Michael Spencer and Barclay president Bob Diamond, were also included.

These were the very same people whose actions, the nation had been led to believe, led us into financial Armageddon a mere 18 months previously. As with Oguchi Onyewu’s generosity it simply didn’t compute unless you considered they were attempting to purge themselves of guilt at vast personal expense.

Top giver Hohn is an interesting example. His activist TCI fund grabbed the headlines in 2005 when it foiled attempts by Deutsche Borse to purchase the London Stock Exchange, though his modus operandi has generally been to steer clear of publicity. His tenacious way of doing business, contrasted with his philanthropic activity, led the Evening Standard to dub him the “locust with  a heart” in a 2007 article.

Through TCI he donates huge sums of money to his wife’s Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, which invests in projects that help children in developing countries, and if he wanted to make a song and dance about his philanthropic activities it wouldn’t be very hard. If Hohn feels any guilt over his huge pay then he’s expressing it very privately.

There was, however, something a little less subtle about HSBC CEO Michael Geoghegan’s decision to donate £4m of his bonus to charity this year, as did Standard Chartered chief Peter Sands, who pledged to donate £2.1m. Coming as it did at the peak of the furore over bonuses, it was hard to view their actions as anything other than an attempt to curry favour with a public apparently ready to tear bankers limb from limb and  pick over the carcasses themselves.

The public and the media are entitled to their cynicism, but ultimately perhaps we should just be satisfied that some of the UK’s biggest earners are throwing their considerable financial weight behind charitable causes. Those who benefit presumably won’t be too worried whether their benefactors were motivated by guilt or by pure altruism.

And as for Oguchi Onyewu – if he lines up in the USA side that faces England at the World Cup on 12 June, square mile is hoping he’s just as generous on the pitch as he seems to be off it.