FSA will publish RBS report but, given sanitization, what’s the point?

The saga of the Financial Services Authority supposed “review” of the Royal Bank of Scotland’s pre-implosion behaviour is getting more ridiculous by the day.

After two weeks of more or less continuous u-turns and farcical claims, the regulator yesterday succumbed to growing fury from politicians and others and agreed to publish some sort of report into what went wrong at the state-owned bank, which is officially the most expensive bank in the world to bail out.

But it won’t do so until March at the earliest, and virtually everybody who is mentioned in the report will be given the chance to get out their blue pencils and censor anything they consider unfavourable to themselves (!!)

A report the Guardian suggests that the report, which followed a 17-month, £7.7m investigation by the ‘Big Four’ accountancy firm PWC (which as I’ve pointed out is of course not conflicted at all), will have to be “approved” by Sir Fred Goodwin and other members of the management team who led the bank to its doom.

It also seems that former RBS non-executives including Peter Sutherland, Sir Steve Robson and Archie Hunter will be given the right to excise any unfavourable passages, as will the non-executives who were retained by the bank, Colin Buchan and Joe McHale. The current Royal Bank of Scotland will also need to give the report its consent.

This has to be some kind of sick joke surely? It’s as if some limp-wristed schoolteacher allowed his pupils to remove anything that they disagreed with in their end-of-term reports before taking them home to Mummy!

Apparently Lord Turner’s change of heart on making the report public followed pressure from Andrew Tyrie, chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, and took place hours before a meeting with business secretary Vince Cable.

It came following the emergence of a leaked US embassy cable, from WikiLeaks and dated September 11, 2009, that reported Hampton as saying directors had breached “their fiduciary responsibilities” – contradicting the FSA’s supposed findings. Clearly this makes a mockery of the FSA’s statement of December 2nd, 2010.

Earlier blogs on the FSA/PWC report into RBS
The FSA/PwC investigation into RBS ‘bad decisions’ is a joke, right?
The FSA wanted someone to whitewash RBS and, sure enough, PwC obliged

The blog post was published 16 December 2010