Just when one thought things couldn't get any worse for the reputation of the City of London. Hewlett-Packard's allegations Tuesday that Autonomy "used accounting improprieties, misrepresentations and disclosure failures to inflate the underlying financial metrics of the company prior to its acquisition by HP" comes at the end of a terrible year for the UK's financial district.

The news broke on the same day that former UBS trader Kweku Adoboli was sentenced to seven years in prison for fraud, in connection with a $2.3bn loss, perpetrated at the investment bank's London offices. In recent months, UK banks have paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines to US regulators for a litany of offenses, including rigging key market-reference rates, money laundering and sanctions-busting. That comes on top of billions of pounds in compensation to victims of various mis-selling scandals. Every scandal reinforces the perception that the UK became the boom-time Wild West of financial services.