THE black day for RBS that saw the bank accused in Parliament of deliberately misleading MPs has been hailed a “game changer for victims”.
Former customers alleged to have suffered at the hands of the banking giant’s “turnaround” division, Global Restructuring Group (GRG), said they were “cockahoop” at seeing the bank under pressure.
Retired businessman Nigel Henderson, who lives in Brechin, Angus, previously owned hotels in Montrose and Skye. He has been embroiled in a lengthy battle with RBS, claiming it pushed his business into bankruptcy in 2001.
Mr Henderson, 69, said he was “thrilled” after shadow Treasury minister Clive Lewis told Parliament on Monday he believes RBS executives, including chief executive Ross McEwan and chairman Sir Howard Davies, “misled the Treasury Select Committee in their evidence and had a stated policy of misleading members of this House.”
Mr Lewis said he had seen an unredacted copy of the Financial Conduct Authority investigation that appears to contradict RBS bosses’ claims to the committee that cases of mistreatment were “isolated”. He said: “In one shocking passage of the report out of hundreds [of passages] the bank boasted one family business was set to ‘lose their shirts’ so RBS could get a ‘chunky equity deal’.”
And speaking in the House of Commons last month, Mr Lewis described RBS’s treatment of small businesses as perhaps the “largest theft anywhere, ever”.
Last night, Mr Henderson, who has joined forces with a number of different bodies co-ordinating legal actions against RBS for fraud, said: “What has come out is that management now admit what has happened. It’s a game changer for us – for all their victims. I’m thrilled it is all being brought out into the open and that can only be good for us. I’m cockahoop.”
Mr Henderson said the bank would not let him pay off a mortgage on a hotel he owned with the £800,000 proceeds from a previous hotel sale due to terms of his arrangement.
“They took everything from us, including our house. We were evicted,” Mr Henderson said. “What happened to us and thousands of other people is a travesty of justice and symptomatic of the greed displayed by the management of RBS, who had
no interest in anything other than self-
aggrandisement. They were not interested in safeguarding customers.
Aberdeen businessman Rod Coffey, 52, owned Stable Services, a firm that supplied drilling tools, taking over the company in 2006 to a point – in 2008 – when it had a turnover of £29.5million. When the financial crash struck and he needed funds, his firm was directed to RBS’s GRG unit and was subsequently put out of business and sold for just £1.7m, with the loss of 40 jobs.
Mr Coffey, who now runs Key Energy Ventures and is CEO of NXG Drilling Services, said GRG “forced” the firm into administration, despite having received at least one offer to buy the firm. He said: “I hope this will be a good thing. I know there are guys in my position who want to see some of these people put in jail for what they’ve done. It’s hard, as a lot of them on the ground were doing what they were told, but now it’s being made clear that no-one had any interest in saving my business.
“We can only hope this is the start of the justice process.”
Andrew Bailey and John Griffith-Jones, the respective chief executive and chairman of the FCA are due to appear in front of the Treasury Select Committee today.
Chairwoman Nicky Morgan is set to
question the watchdog bosses over the leaked report.
Stewart Hosie of the SNP warned that delaying publishing the leaked RBS report risks “reputational damage” to the FCA.
The MP said it could make a “mockery” of the regulator, with copies already in circulation online.
“Time is important here. If you don’t publish, others will,” he said.
James Hayward, CEO of RGL Management, representing affected former customers of RBS, said: “It is no surprise to us that RBS has been accused of misleading MPs. The cases that we have seen joining our group have demonstrated consistent destructive and aggressive behaviours by the RBS GRG division – a division that was supposed to be help turnaround businesses in its care.”
RBS has strongly denied misleading the committee.
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