RBS battering continues as MPs call for criminal charges over “largest theft anywhere, ever”

The debate centred around the lender’s now notorious Global Restructuring Group (GRG), and contributions from MPs included suggestions that the unit acted “more like an abattoir” than a rehabilitation for firms.

Yesterday the GRG, which was set up to turnaround businesses hit by the financial crisis but was disbanded in 2014 amid the allegations of brutal asset stripping and mistreatment, was widely condemned in the debate by MPs that included a call for an independent inquiry into the treatment of businesses by all financial institutions and the possibility of crimminal charges.

MPs also heard businesses were “carved up like a Sunday roast” and only placed in GRG because they wanted to move banks or had made a complaint.

Figures have shown that of the 12,000 small firms which were GRG clients most went on to be liquidated.

Speaking yesterday in the Commons, Shadow Treasury minister Clive Lewis said: “We know 90 per cent of GRG-administered businesses never made it back to mainstream banking. This is a very high proportion.

“The cost of this is immeasurable, but we believe it to be in the tens of billions. So let’s be clear here: this is the potential size of the injustice that has taken place in our country. If it is this big, it may be the largest theft anywhere, ever.”

Mr Lewis added: “This was meant to be somewhere where they were put back to try to get them into a situation where they would come back as a viable business. Actually, it was more than an intensive care unit, it was more like an abattoir, where they were actually stripped and taken apart.”

The GRG is still the subject of an ongoing Financial Conduct Authority investigation and RBS has already put aside £400 million to compensate customers and launched a new complaints system relating to “complex” fees and dealings with its debt restructuring unit between 2008 and 2013.

However, MPs yesterday were calling for criminal charges to be brought against the bankers at the unit, with Shadow business minister Bill Esterson saying: “There are many … who believe criminal investigations to be the appropriate way forward at RBS GRG.”

And customers suing RBS over the affair also spoke up yesterday to accused the lender of having “obscured” a bigger picture of the wrongdoing linked to GRG.

As MPs prepared for yesterday’s debate, RGL Management issued a new report that claims mistreatment of business customers was an “RBS policy driven from the top” and only represented a “cog within the machinery of RBS”.

It claims reporting and investigations into the unit have focused too heavily “on symptoms rather than the cause”.

RGL said in a statement: “It is clear to us this has been very convenient for RBS and its apologists who have happily embraced a narrowing of scope to enable the reality and scale of what RBS did to its own SME clients to remain the subject of doubt, confusion and counter claims.”

Yesterday’s events took place in front of the backdrop of a memo sent to GRG staff in 2009 published by the Treasury Select Committee.

It told staff that “sometimes you need to let customers hang themselves”, under the heading “rope”.

And seeming to support the accusations contained in RGL’s report of an callous, institutionalised avarice in the years after the bank’s record £45 billion bailout, Tory MP and committee chairwoman Nicky Morgan said the 2009 memo “lifts the lid on a culture at RBS”.

The bank admitted in November 2016 it “did not meet the standard it set of itself which impacted on how it treated some of its SME customers”.