Failings at RBS

While we can sympathise with RBS shareholders settling out of court (your report, 7 June), there are good public policy reasons for the case to continue.

Taxpayers bailed out RBS (and its directors) for £46 billion, it remains in public ownership, and on selling our 73 per cent stake, the government will not recoup anything like that sum. All its “profits” reported from 20002007 were more than reversed immediately thereafter, and after nine years its losses continue, now totalling around £60bn.

Its directors and executives were permitted by Lord Myners, the responsible minister appointed by Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, both to retain their phone number bonuses based on such discredited numbers, and to swan off into the sunset with massive pension “entitlements” effectively now paid by us (eg Fred Goodwin’s £713,000 per annum for life from age 50, later reduced by him) rather than capped at the limit of £27,000 per annum applying in all other bankruptcies.

Little light was generated by Fred Goodwin and ex-chairman Sir Tom Mckillop at the only public hearing to date (the televised Treasury Select Committee in February 2009); and Archie Hunter, CA, RBS’S then audit and remuneration chairman, has not had to

confirm publicly that he fully supported the rights issue prospectus and fully understood what Goodwin was doing (such as with complex instruments of debt consolidation and collateralisation, which Sir Tom admitted he did not).

The Dutch regulatory authority has not publicly explained its lax oversight of ABN Amro Bank, whose acquisition by the Rbs-led consortium caused RBS’S downfall.

The public is surely entitled to credible answers to these points and other aspects of this debacle for Scottish and UK banking, which can be answered satisfactorily only in court.

JOHN BIRKETT Horseleys Park, St Andrews, Fife