'Cake Sale' outside Vulture Fund law firm
This morning a group of campaigners from Jubilee Debt Campaign arrived outside Dechert LLP with an assortment of cakes, a large folding table and some vulture puppets.
The stunt was designed to raise employee awareness of the representations provided to vulture funds by Dechert. The success in this aim was instant, with people emerging out of the office having heard that free homemade cake was on offer outside. By the time the rush of 9am commuters arrived we were giving away cakes and explanatory flyers left, right and centre.
After 20 minutes of peaceable cake vending we unfurled a banner requesting that Dechert desist from feeding the vultures. This was met with a very angry Dechert representative who stated that we were holding a protest and ‘not a real cake sale’. This position was difficult to argue with as we had already offered her a free ‘profiteerole’.
After returning inside the angry representative immediately phoned the police who arrived, discussed, got tempted by some vulture cake and finally asked that we move everything 40 cm forward. We happily did as asked and continued to offer punning pastries to grateful employees. By 9.30am, vultures and all, the cake sale broke into song to the tune of ‘let them eat cake’ and other ballads devised by Lucy, our resident campaigning actor.
All-in-all it was a very successful morning. Having providing many Dechert employees with a piece of cake and some troubling facts we headed back to the Jubilee office to continue the final push to get the Vulture Funds Private Member’s Bill through its second reading on Friday .
You can find more photos of the event on our Flickr page and a film will be up online soon. Thank you to everyone who attended the event and to those who provided cakes and the titles of our very successful punning pastries.
Photos: Marcin Morawicki