RBS and HBOS: Questions of competence, not corruption
Johnny Cameron, the cove who ran Royal Bank of Scotland’s investment banking division at the time the bank went to the very brink of collapse, has agreed with the City watchdog that he won’t ever again work full time in a senior position in the financial services industry.
Hmmm.
You might find that story about as surprising as “starving, rabid dog in hot climate bites sweaty fat man”.
Or to put it another way, after Royal Bank was bailed out to the tune of around £50bn by taxpayers, it would be slightly odd if any of those in senior executive or non-executive positions at RBS back then were deemed suitable stewards of financial businesses.
In fact what some may wonder is why – some 18 months after the meltdown at RBS – Mr Cameron is so far the only former director of that bank to be the object of a formal restriction on where and how he can work.
It’s also worth noting that Cameron jumped before he was pushed: he agreed to be disbarred (so to speak). But he retains the right to act as a part-time advisor to City firms (which, since his very public humiliation, is all he wanted to do, in any case).
Here’s perhaps the most significant part of the FSA’s statement about Mr Cameron:
“The FSA has not made any findings of regulatory breach against Cameron and he has not made any admissions”.
Or to put it another way, the FSA questions his competence to run a bank, but doesn’t think he broke any of its rules.
What that implies is that it’s quite possible to be on the bridge of one the world’s great banks, which is part of the UK’s economic infrastructure, as it ploughs into a humungous iceberg, while following the FSA’s rulebook and the law.
Some, I suppose, may wonder whether the rules and the law are quite what they should be.
What also follows?
Well, the FSA continues to investigate the events leading to the disasters at RBS and at HBOS.
In RBS’s case, the focus is on its reckless acquisition of the poisonous rump of the Dutch bank ABN Amro, which made RBS too dependent on unreliable short-term funding in the wholesale money markets and also imported several tankers of loss-making loans and investments on to its overstretched balance sheet.
At HBOS, the FSA is looking at how the bank lent so many tens of billions of pounds to companies – especially property ones – that were acutely vulnerable to any economic slowdown.
Both probes have been going on for well over a year. So it’s reasonable to conclude that if the FSA had found evidence of fraud or serious malpractice, we would have known by now – such is the propensity of these things to leak.
What that means is that if the FSA finds that the banks and their directors did anything untoward, the verdicts are likely to be about their competence and diligence, not their probity.
Which some might see as something of a great escape for bankers who many would hold responsible for the biggest raid on taxpayers’ wealth in British history.
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