RBS report blames poor decisions
As an FSA report into the failure of Royal Bank of Scotland blames its own light-touch regulation and poor management, the bank’s chairman tells Channel 4 News he supports tougher sanctions.
The report, published by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) sheds light on what went wrong in the lead-up to RBS’s $45bn bailout by the UK government.
The FSA admit they failed to spot problems at the bank because it was under political pressure to operate a hands-off regulatory regime. The regulatory body say its own monitoring was “flawed” and “provided insufficient challenge” to RBS.
RBS, which is now more than 80 per cent owned by the UK taxpayer, needed rescuing amid the 2008 credit crunch after being weakened by the disastrous £50bn acquisition of Dutch bank ABN Amro in 2007. The RBS chief executive at the time was Sir Fred Goodwin.
RBS Chairman Sir Philip Hampton, who was drafted in after the bank’s collapse, told Channel 4 News that he supported tougher sanctions against bankers who make mistakes.
“There has been some attribution of guilt,” he said. “But there’s almost certainly some hole here in the sanctioning regime if only one person has been identified.”
There’s almost certainly some hole here in the sanctioning regime if only one person has been identified. RBS Chairman Philip Hampton
Sir Philip added: “I totally understand the indignation that someone who had run a bank as catastrophically as Fred Goodwin ran RBS at the end, can still be financially pretty well off.
The report recommends that banks should gain regulatory approval for significant acquisitions, and possibly also obtain independent advice about such deals.
It outlines six principal reasons for RBS’s downfall, including excessive reliance on riskier short-term funding and inadequate due diligence ahead of the ABN Amro takeover.
Bad decisions
In a 300-word report released last December, the FSA said it had found no evidence of fraud or dishonest activity in the lead-up to the crisis, although RBS made a series of bad decisions.
The full report is being published at the request of the Treasury select committee, which said the original statement summing up its investigations failed to answer important questions or show that lessons had been learned.
The FSA has said tomorrow’s publication will not include a blow-by-blow account of RBS’s failure, and those hoping for an investigation into the leadership of Sir Fred Goodwin are likely to be disappointed.
RBS was expanded aggressively under Sir Fred’s eight-year leadership. He was replaced by Stephen Hester after the bank’s bailout. By the time of its collapse, its balance sheet was bigger than the entire UK GDP.
