Thank goodness for whistle blowers. Long, long time ago I remember writing about Royal Bank Of Scotland. So many small business owners were complaining they'd been deliberately forced into insolvency by devious, underhand tactics, in order that the bank could strip them of their assets that it just couldn't have been a coincidence.
Of course there was no proof that it was a deliberate policy, there would always have been some businesses which would have failed anyway and so on. As compelling as the circumstantial evidence was, and it was very compelling, proof beyond any doubt was just about questionable. Although in certain individual cases the behaviour of the bank was so very blatant that it probably was actionable, if there had been any money left to take action.
Years ago Vince Cable, then a minister, ordered a report on the seemingly nefarious doings of RBS, it's never been published. If it does attempt a whitewash they won't publish it now that the truth is out there. The leaked documents point very strongly indeed to an orchestrated campaign to force good entrepreneurial businesses into bankruptcy, to steal their buildings by reducing valuations and then calling in loans, that sort of thing, defaults which weren't defaults at all, seems to have been another strategy. Special 'assistance' to push costs higher and higher.
Some businessmen used the money from their homes to prop up their businesses and lost those too, marriages broke up and good, hard working people had breakdowns and mental health issues. Last night RBS managed to find an executive willing to try and defend the indefensible on television, one of the guilty clutching at straws? I cannot say. It was not impressive however.
People and businesses which purchased property wrongly repossessed by RBS cannot be made victims too and sorry to say it's the taxpayer who will end up paying, but compensation must be huge; the value of all assets lost plus interest, lost earnings plus interest (at the rates from then, not now) and proper compensation for hurt and suffering. That could literally be millions of pounds per victim and there are certainly hundreds of victims, maybe more.
That's one heck of a bill, it's also justice and just maybe those victims will go back into the business arena and make things, or provide services, or regenerate run down areas, in other words make a contribution to society, something RBS has done the opposite of.
It would be nice if the Queen could strip them of the title 'Royal' but there's another Bank Of Scotland so that would cause confusion, maybe we could call them CBS, you can work out what the C stands for I'm sure.
Malcolm Snook author, blogger and sailor.
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