publicly mis-stepping is unfortunate. but a state-bailed out global bank that constantly demonstrates to the world its total inability to walk unaided is unforgivable. RBS/NatWest’s overreach, malpractice and under-achieving sets it as a poster child for disastrous impropriety.
let’s dive right in to this mirky financial pool.
emperor’s new clothes syndrome
I spent my working life in strategy consultancy – most of it in the City during the boom and later bust years of the “noughties”. In the twisted world of financial lending, no term could be more appropriate. Banks during that period were virtually printing their own dirty money. Exponential growth, a rocketing share price, these monetary wizards fooled everyone with their City circus act and sleight of hand.
Forget rabbits, these guys were conjuring gold out of their hats.
They fooled everyone.
It was all a grand illusion. There was nothing clever going on, no genius game plan, it was all just a corporate con trick of pass the parcel by banks swapping dodgy debts between each other. The bankers must have known what they were risking, but they were arrogantly swept up in the wave of the public perception they themselves had built around themselves.
And no better example could be found than RBS and its pound shop prince with the ocean floor deep pockets, Fred Goodwin. His overreach without oversight nearly destroyed us all and ushered in the worst and most destructive banking crash since the Great Depression.
A lesson learnt or just the first act in a Greek tragedy that went from bad to worse?
enter the not so sweet-smelling Alison Rose
After a Treasury draining taxpayer bailout by Gordon Brown, you’d have thought “our bank” would be a pillar of propriety and professional circumspection. But no. What we had was a bank so toxic it had to shed its very branding and take on the name of NatWest, the name it used outside the RBS home-base of Scotland. I predicted that RBS would have to rebrand to NatWest at the time.
It should have heralded in a new financial age under a supposedly new-age CEO, Alison Rose. But to believe that would be a fatal mistake. NatWest took taxpayer money intended to put small business back on its feet – but used it to rebuild the bank’s balance sheet – compounding their crimes by asset-stripping and clawing back customer investment without notice as well, deliberately destroying viable customer businesses and livelihoods in the process.
But Rose’s downfall would come from her grotesque and unforgivable betrayal of the fundamental confidence and trust in their bank expected by any customer – that of client confidentiality.
There is never any going back from that. She had to go.
Rose’s Loose-lipped chatter with the gutter media
Ms Rose attended a dinner in the City at the time when UK politician Nigel Farage had fallen foul of the unbelievable arrogance of NatWest subsidiary private bank Coutts, closing his account for not having the “kind of values” that the bank felt it should be associated with. The concept of a bank selecting clients on the basis of their legally-held political leanings was unprecedented.
She wouldn’t even admit that gross blunder, instead fabricated the excuse to the BBC financial hack Simon Jack that Farage’s disposable banking assets didn’t meet the financial criteria for Coutts.
In other words, that he simply wasn’t wealthy enough for them.
A bank employee at any level would be instantly dismissed for discussing a client’s financial position out of context – and the weasel-like contortions she resorted to to save her position might have worked was it not for the media and political maelstrom she’d created – not to mention the imminent arrival of the bank’s financial results.
Ultimately, it was Alison Rose who didn’t have the kind of values shareholders had a right to expect from their CEO.
You can take the toxic brand out of the bank, but not the basic toxic behaviour, it seems…