Last week it was brokers, before that it was APRA, and this week it’s the turn of Australia’s major ratings agency. Standard & Poor’s is the latest organisation to face the HIH blame-layers, with MD Ian Thompson telling the Australian Financial Review its ratings for HIH were based on information supplied by the company. Until early February S&P’s acted on management advice that HIH would post a loss of $20 million to $30 million, advice that Mr Thompson now concedes was “patently wrong”.