Lifestyle that means never having to say you’re sorry…

While RBS recruits graduates on £2,700 a year [in India], former boss Fred the Shred is currently managing on £342,500

After spending the best part of a decade on state-sponsored life-support, Royal Bank of Scotland is starting to show some signs of life. A loss-making basket-case for much of the past nine years, the bank looks set to return to making consistent profits. The government is salivating at the possibility of re-privatising the 71 per cent stake it owns, even though that would almost certainly be at a £20 billion plus loss to the taxpayer.

The government is salivating at the possibility of re-privatising its 71 percent stake, even though that would almost certainly be atv a £20bn plus loss to the the taxpayer.

But the the ways in which this return to profitability have been achieved have not been without controversy. Indeed some would argue that some of them have been downright immoral, in addition to being a betrayal of taxpayers who rescued RBS from oblivion with a £45.5bn rescue package in 2008-9, the British based staff who have worked hard to ensure the bank has a viable future and the customers who are seeing branches shut.

Barely a month passes without the announcement of a fresh batch of branch closures. RBS insists these are justified because more and more customers are doing their banking online or via mobile apps, even though plenty of people still depend on their branches.  

By the time the current round of closures is complete, the bank will have only 854 branches left in the UK of which 89 will be in Scotland. So two-thirds of the 2,350 branches that former chief executive Fred Goodwin inherited when he took the reins in 2000 will by thre end of the summer have been turned into wine-bars, otherwise re-let, or boarded up.

The shrinkage of the wider RBS global workforce has been even more dramatic – staff numbers have plummeted from over 220,000 in October 2008 to less than 71,000 today.

Dwindling staff numbers in its home country have been marched by rapid growth in India, with alot of work being transferred to RBS’s “global hubs” in the Indian cities of Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Gurfaon and Bangalore, where it has more than 12,000 staff.

In the sprawling Chennai hub, as this newspaper reveals today, the state-rescued lender is pauying Indian graduates £2,700 a year, one tenth of the bank’s average pay in the UK to fill analyst roles.

The bank has come under fire for its refusal to accept responsibility for the behaviour of its global restructuring group, which is accused of deliberately wrecking viable business customers in order to profit at their expense. Its activities were described by Clive Lewis MP as “the largest theft anywhere, ever”.

RBS has also faced severe criticism for its cack-handed approach to spinning off 314 “Williams & Glyn” branches in England to create a new, standalone competitor bank.

The project turned out to be a disaster, even after RBS poured £2.2 billion into it, and most of the branches are now also being mothballed.

Among all the pain, it’s worth asking how Fred Goodwin, who was the architect of the bank’s 2008 collapse, and is therefore largely responsible bank’s current travails, is getting on.

He has suffered one or two minor indignities since being ousted. In February 2009, he was forced to appear before Treasury committee, where he made a qualified apology, insisting it was “too simple to blame it all on me”. Following intense pressure, he felt compelled to hand back some of his pension in June 2009 – meaning his annual pension fell to £342,500 a year.

He was stripped of his knighthood in January 2012. Only a select band of despots, traitors, and brigands – includ­ing Robert Mugabe, Nicolae Ceaucescu, Anthony Blunt and Lester Piggott – had suffered such an indignity before.

Goodwin was also, reportedly, turfed out of the family home by his wife Joyce after she discovered he was in a relationship with a senior human-resources manager at the bank, a liaison he tried and failed to cover up with a super-injunction in the English High Court. According to the National Records of Scotland data, Fred and Joyce were divorced in 2016.

That said, a lot else has also gone Goodwin’s way. He was cleared of misconduct by the Financial Services Authority in December 2011. A five-year probe by the Crown Office found “insufficient evidence” of criminal behaviour to bring charges against RBS or any of its former directors.

He remains a member of Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland and a fellow of Chartered Banker Institute, and last summer escaped a humiliating High Court appearance after RBS settled with shareholders. Arguably the bank spent some £1 billion to ensure the case was not heard and that former directors such as Fred did not have to appear in court.

Goodwin, who is not believed to have worked since quitting a job with the architecture firm RMJM in 2011, is leading the life of Riley compared to the tens of thousands of RBS staff who are losing their jobs Indian workers on derisory pay, and business people RBS stripped of their firms.

He dabbles in the restoration of classic cars, pootling along in a convertible Triumph Stag from his plush Edinburgh home to play 18 holes at his favoured golf course at Archerfield in East Lothian, and regularly shoots pheasants with a coterie of friends believed to include the double-glazing tycoon Gerard Eadie, former investment banker Matthew Greenburgh, former stockbroker Jamie Matheson and construction boss Sir Fraser Morrison.

He still consorts with old friends such as Sir Jackie Stewart, entertains amid the Rococo splendour of Edinburgh’s five-star Prestonfield House Hotel and occasionally shows up at a quasi-Masonic Edinburgh institution called the Oyster Club to quaff Guinness, champagne and oysters with members of Edinburgh “great and the good”.   

What is most galling, however, is Goodwin still apparently can’t really see what all the fuss is about.

Sources say that RBS is pretty much a taboo subject in his company, and suggest he still doesn’t accept he did anything wrong. Sources suggest he thinks that, if only the former prime minister Gordon Brown – who in his latest memoir ‘My Life, Our Times’ said Goodwin showed “no contrition” as he “walked away with all of his past bonuses untouched” – and former chancellor Alistair Darling had allowed him to stay on at the bank, he would have done a better job at getting it back on the straight and narrow than those who followed him. That’s serious hubris for you.

This comment piece was published in the Mail on Sunday (Scottish edition) on 6 May 2018

Article as published in the Scottish Mail on Sunday