‘Getting it wrong’ not a RBS get-out down at Westminster

Comment Martin Flanagan

We shouldn’t get precious in the media. Plenty of journalists have phrases on a metaphorical keyboard save-get key. “Dealt a blow”, “launched a crackdown”, “corporate fat cats”, “braced for a backlash”.

RBS boss Ross Mcewan merely had his own contritional/but conditional version at the Treasury select committee, which was grilling him and bank chairman Sir Howard Davies on the serious misdemeanours of the bank’s old Global Restructuring Group (GRG): “We got things wrong.” It was seemingly on a loop.

But Mcewan did not row back on his issue with some of the more damning assessments of the Promontory Financial Group, commissioned by the Financial Conduct Authority to write a report on how RBS exploited smaller companies in GRG. MPS voiced frustration at what they saw as the Royal boss’s equivocation.

Tony Boorman, MD of Promontory, was pushing at an open door with MPS when he said RBS had “frankly forgotten” its aim to help turn around struggling businesses. Lucre had trumped compassion.

Promontory estimated that between a third and a half of all firms in GRG ended up going insolvent. RBS had claimed that figure was only 10 per cent.

There was a bizarre interchange when Mcewan said that the definition of “turn around” for businesses at GRG included seeing firms folding and going into liquidation if necessary. I suppose assisted dying is a sort of turnaround for the terminally ill.

Pressed, he said the bank clearly had got a lot of things wrong and some behaviour at GRG was totally unacceptable, confusion reigned and communication to SMES was poor. But it seemed to take an age for the boss to agree “in certain cases” RBS staff may have been “insensitive or aggressive” with SMES.

His chairman added: “If that is what a customer thinks, then we have to take that on the chin.” Which sounded not unlike the non-apology apology of celebrity/ sports star twitter storms: “I’m sorry if anybody took offence at what I said.”

The issue of controversial GRG shadow directors on SME boards floated away, but you felt Mcewan would have given much for Westminster’s finest to accept “we got things wrong”, draw a line under and move on.