Metro boss attacks delays to accounting error inquiry

METRO Bank has criticised the City regulator over the time it is taking to complete an investigation of a 2019 accounting error that triggered a share price collapse.

In an unusual public attack on the Financial Conduct Authority, Metro’s chief executive Dan Frumkin compared its pace to the gestation period of elephants. He said: “An elephant could have had three children by now.

“They raise the curtain when they raise the curtain, so you just sit in the audience hopeful the curtain goes up. You take a nap, get a snack. It will be what it will be.”

The regulator has been investigating the challenger bank since it admitted to miscalculating the riskiness of property loans in early 2019 – the revelation that triggered a share price plunge and left investors nursing heavy losses.

The crisis caused turmoil at Metro as shareholders raised concern over governance and compliance.

The bank’s founder, Vernon Hill, and its chief executive at the time, Craig Donaldson, left within months.

Mr Frumkin’s frustrations emerged as the bank narrowed its losses for the first half of the year to £139m, from £241m a year earlier, after Covid sent it into the red. Metro’s stock market valuation has collapsed to only £173m after five years as a public company.

It floated in 2016 on a valuation of £1.6bn and had high hopes of entering the FTSE 100 within three years

Its largest shareholder is now the Colombian billionaire Jaime Gilinski Bacal, one of the wealthiest people in Latin America who was once the biggest investor in TSB’S Spanish owner Banco de Sabadell.