MP accuses RBS leaders of misleading Parliament over business banking scandal

Top bosses at Royal Bank of Scotland have been accused of deliberately misleading MPs probing the bank’s conduct towards its business customers.

While RBS executives, including chief executive Ross McEwan and chairman Sir Howard Davies, have long argued, constantly and vocally, that cases where the bank’s customers made vulnerable by the conditions brought about by the financial crisis were forced to the wall and stripped of their assets were “isolated”, shadow Treasury Minister Clive Lewis has this week revealed that he has seen evidence that the practice was in fact “systematic and widespread”.

Mr Lewis’ assertion stems from an unredacted copy of the Financial Conduct Authority’s investigation into the conduct of the bank’s now notorious Global Restructuring Group (GRG) that both the bank and the City watchdog have vigorously resisted pressure from campaigners and politicians to publish.

Having himself now seen the full results of the FCA investigation, Mr Lewis said: “In one shocking passage of the report out of hundreds the bank boasted one family business was set to ‘lose their shirts’ so RBS could get a ‘chunky equity deal’.

“Furthermore it is clear the summary of the report the FCA has published is what I would politely describe as a sanitised version.”

While the FCA resisted pressure to publish its full report in the scandal, in October last year RBS chief executive Ross McEwan welcomed the regulator’s decision to dismiss the “most serious allegations” levelled against the bank’s controversial Global Restructuring Group (GRG) in a move that campaigners immediately branded a “whitewash”.

Mr Lewis now says says the contents of the FCA’s full report mean the RBS top brass “misled the Treasury Select Committee in their evidence and had a stated policy of misleading members of this House”.

The claim has ratcheted up the already intense pressure on the FCA to publish the full investigation into the bank’s handling of small businesses which was described by MPs last month as the “largest theft anywhere, ever” as it carved up firms like a “Sunday roast” as they called for criminal charges to be brought.

RBS’s Global Restructuring Group had a one point 12,000 small firms as clients and despite its stated purpose being to turn the firms around, most went on to be liquidated.

A spokesman for the GRG Business Action Group, which represents more than 500 businesses put into financial distress under the division, said: “The immediate publication of the FCA report is an urgent priority.”

An RBS spokesman said: “The evidence we provided to the Treasury Committee accurately reflected the bank’s position. We would strongly deny the suggestion that we misled the committee.”