Every Monday we feature a favourite Alex cartoon selected by our readers. This week’s offering is from 2012.

Compliance was always a popular theme in the cartoon, particularly it seems among compliance officers themselves. We received numerous requests over the years from heads of compliance asking to reproduce our cartoons in presentations, brochures or books, saying that they wanted to show people the human face of their industry. Maybe this was to lull their victims into a false sense of security or perhaps they genuinely found the regulations they had to implement sometimes as ridiculous as bankers and satirists did.

Compliance evolved over the four decades of Alex’s career. Back in the 1980s it scarcely existed. After that, it became a job for bankers or brokers who had failed to make enough money in their own careers, so they went over the the Dark Side to prevent anyone else from doing so. To adapt the old adage about teachers: “those who can, do; those who can’t, regulate.” The advantage of these poachers-turned-gamekeepers was that they at least knew all the tricks of the trade, so could catch wrongdoers. But over recent years working in compliance has become an end in itself. Far from being an indication of having failed at a real job, it has become a respectable and well-remunerated career, which often requires applicants to have a post-graduate degree.

Chinese walls are the theoretical divisions between departments in an investment bank, designed to prevent conflicts of interest or insider dealing. In the politically correct 1990s it was decided that Chinese walls should be renamed “information barriers”, as the traditional term was deemed racist. Why the Chinese would be offended at being associated with law-abidingness and the due application of procedure isn’t really clear. These days Chinese walls are referred to by the rather po-faced term “ethical walls”.

“As a head of compliance, I loved every one of the compliance-themed cartoons” emails reader Anatoly Kirievsky from Sydney. “Have gone back to the start, and flipped through all of them. We all have our favourites. Mine is the one about Alex’s heart attack, and the Chinese wall. When I assumed responsibility for the Chinese wall arrangements between the investment bankers and research in our firm, I had this cartoon printed on my wall.” Does he mean his Chinese Wall? How on earth did he pin a cartoon to it?

“Thank you so much for the smiles, smirks, laughs, and the hesitations…” Anatoly goes on. “What I mean by that - when I found the ones that really resonated, the hesitation whether to circulate them to others on work email or not - whether the particular cartoon would trigger someone/something. In most cases, the answer was to take a photo and circulate via an SMS.” Ah, so, here we have it from the horse’s mouth: evidence that compliance officers were up to the same sneaky tricks that they banned everyone else from doing.

Having a heart attack was one of those life experiences that we had to put Alex through. He’d got married, had children, had affairs and mid-life now beckoned. A couple of our City contacts had suffered heart attacks when they were in their forties (they’re both still alive and working a couple of decades later, we’re pleased to report). Obviously the stress of their job, combined with too many long lunches, had taken its toll on their health. For Alex, succumbing to a heart attack was a good way of showing to his bosses that he was giving his utmost to his work and merited a big bonus.

If you click on the strip above you can read the full story of Alex’s heart attack (spoiler: he survived).

If you’ve got any suggestions for a favourite cartoon for future inclusion please email us. And do tell us if there’s a particular reason why it appealed to you.