Dubious appointment

THEY just don’t get it, do they? Despite the controversy surrounding his name, the Treasury has confirmed corporate lawyer Charles Randell as chairman of the Financial Conduct Authority.

Clearly, a man who used a notorious tax avoidance scheme – described by one HMRC official as a ‘scam for scumbags’ – and was forced to pay back £114,000, plus interest, should have no place as the supposed moral regulator of the City of London. While the vast majority of Britons pay EVERY PENNY they owe in tax, and while small businesses struggle under constant inquisition from the taxman, Mr Randell shamefully sought loopholes to avoid paying his fair share.

How can the public have any faith in his determination to rein in City excess when he appears to regard himself as above the rules? And how very cosy that the firm of headhunters which selected him as a candidate was run by another investor who used this insidious scheme to avoid tax.

To be fair to Chancellor Philip Hammond, he appears not to have known about this flagrant tax dodging, having not been told by senior Treasury mandarin Sir Tom Scholar, the man behind David Cameron’s failed EU renegotiation. But that doesn’t stop the decision being wholly wrong.

Has Whitehall learned none of the lessons from ten years ago, when the greed and incompetence of bankers triggered the great financial crash and forced a vast bail-out at taxpayers’ expense?

This week, Jeremy Corbyn vowed to take on ‘the power of finance’ and make the City a ‘servant’ of the wider economy, leading to – entirely justified – warnings he would reduce London to the status of North Korean capital Pyongyang. The appointment of Mr Randell plays into the hands of the Marxist Labour leader.