FCA gives lawmakers full report on RBS small-business unit

February 16, 2018

The Financial Conduct Authority has handed over to a committee of MPs the full report it commissioned on how the Royal Bank of Scotland systematically mistreated thousands of small business clients after the 2008 banking crisis.

Andrew Bailey, chief executive of the FCA, said in a letter to the Treasury select committee that the regulator was unable to publish the report itself because it had not secured consent from those who gave information before the deadline of Friday set by the MPs.

The committee is due to meet on Tuesday to discuss whether to use parliamentary privilege to circumvent the legal obstacles to publishing the report, which has already been leaked online by disgruntled former business customers of RBS.

Nicky Morgan, chair of the TSC, said: “The committee will meet when parliament returns on Tuesday, February 20. At that meeting, I will be asking members to agree to publish the final, unredacted report under parliamentary privilege as soon as possible.”

The litany of failings at RBS’s Global Restructuring Group — which was meant to help small businesses recover but in fact treated many as cash cows — are chronicled in a 361-page report by Promontory, a financial consultancy commissioned by a UK regulator four years ago.

The saga, which risks besmirching the reputation of Britain’s biggest lender to small businesses, has also prompted questions about the independence of the FCA because of its reluctance to publish more than an interim version the report that excludes some of its harshest findings.

Mr Bailey said in his letter: “One of our concerns about publishing the full report has been that the report includes statements about how much GRG management knew about the failings in GRG.”

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