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Banking news: Farage update, banks’ conduct and the Irish view

August 2, 2023 in history | Tags: 2023, commercial banking, Dame Alison Rose, Dan Wootton, GB News, history, Howard 'Halifax' Brown, Lloyd Russell-Moyle, Nigel Farage, Peter Flavel, Sir Howard Davies, subject access request, UK | 4 comments

More news emerged over the weekend about the state of British banking.

Normally, when Parliament is in recess, there is little news to cover. Traditionally, Britons call this period the ‘silly season’ in the media, full of non-stories.

However, as in 2022, when the Conservative Party leadership race dominated, this summer’s big story is real and gripping: bank account closures.

Even The Guardian is reporting on it regularly, despite Labour’s near radio silence, apart from shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves who implied that sacking Dame Alison Rose was tantamount to sexism because she was the first woman at the head of a large financial institution. So what? Rose was wrong; if she were a mere cashier (teller), she would have been sacked for gross misconduct for violating client confidentiality. On the other hand, Lloyd-Russell Moyle MP said he would support Farage in his quest for fairer rules on account closures.

Farage winning

Clearly, Nigel Farage is winning the battle against NatWest and its subsidiary Coutts, his former bank.

At the end of last week, Farage vowed to start a website dedicated to account closures, more about which below.

Last Friday, July 28, 2023, The Guardian reported (emphases mine):

Nigel Farage is used to being thanked by true believers in Brexit, but the man who came to grasp his hand as he sat down for dinner in London’s Belgravia on Tuesday night was a surprise.

“It was a chap who just said ‘Nigel, I’m a remainer, but please, stand up for us’. He was an Italian businessman in London who was having terrible trouble receiving foreign payments because banks thought he was a money launderer,” the former Ukip leader said.

Hours later, the departure of Dame Alison Rose as NatWest’s chief executive over her role in the Farage “debanking” controversy would give the politician turned broadcaster one of his greatest coups since Brexit.

It has also lifted him from the relative obscurity of his last reinvention, as the star anchor of GB News. Just like old times – when he was a near-omnipresent fixture across all channels – he has suddenly found himself back in the limelight with a soapbox issue that has ministers and the rightwing press following in his wake.

He is now launching a website to collect details of tens of thousands of people he expects will back his campaign against a banking system he claims is “rotten to the core”. While he says it will be “non-political, non-party”, the future political potential of such a database is obvious …

His latest campaign, launched on 30 June in a tweeted video that claimed his accounts with a “prestigious” bank had been closed without explanation, was different. The details were sparingly teased out in tweets and videos before NatWest-owned Coutts was confirmed as the bank in question.

By the time Farage revealed, via a subject access request, that Coutts had compiled a secret 40-page dossier accusing him of being a “disingenuous grifter” who promoted “xenophobic, chauvinistic and racist views”, it had turned into a monumental PR disaster for the bank.

Lloyd Russell-Moyle, a Labour MP who went on Farage’s GB News show on Wednesday night to talk about his own banking struggles as a “politically exposed person”, said: “He has tapped into something here which I think the liberal elite in my own party and in the media have misunderstood, and that is how the banks have treated some people appallingly and how they continue to operate.

“What Farage has done this time is take something that is a privileged, niche problem for him and then really build on it in terms of how the public are treated. It’s effective politics.”

Yet while Russell-Moyle does not view Farage’s banking campaign as a “culture war” issue, close watchers of Farage and various incarnations of Britain’s populist right and far right remain wary.

Joe Mulhall, the director of research at the anti-racism campaign group Hope Not Hate, said Farage had clearly been “looking round” since Brexit for a new issue, adding: “He hasn’t been this relevant for years.”

He added: “For a period he was the keeper of the Brexit flame but … its salience has dissipated so he has been looking for an alternative and seems to have found one that paradoxically makes him a crusader for the ‘working man’ and small businesses wronged by an elite.”

That may be, but Farage has been telling us about his full inbox for weeks now, so he has struck a genuine chord with the British public.

It surprises me that Hope Not Hate would shy away from joining Farage’s campaign in principle. Enough said about them.

Early on Sunday, July 30, the paper reported on the imminent website, which appeared shortly afterwards, and on how unpopular NatWest’s chairman Sir Howard Davies is among Conservative MPs:

The former Ukip leader is to spearhead a website assisting anyone who wants to find out why they have been denied a bank account. Farage used a subject access request to discover that, despite initial denials by Coutts, his political views had played a part in the closure of his account.

Farage is said to want to make the independent website a non-partisan tool designed to help those who believe they have been denied banking services because of their political views. It will provide them with a step-by-step guide to demanding the personal information a bank holds about them.

While NatWest, which owns Coutts, is said to have faced hundreds rather than thousands, of similar requests so far, Farage and his supporters believe the new website will help those daunted by the process of questioning their bank.

“This is cross-party, it is non-partisan,” said an ally. “Dare I say, how the liberal elite – for want of a better term – have managed to turn Nigel Farage into one of the country’s leading consumer champions, I have no idea.”

There has already been a huge fallout from Farage’s case. Dame Alison Rose, the chief executive of NatWest Group, eventually stood down in the wake of the row after she revealed she had been the source of a BBC story claiming Farage’s account had been closed for commercial reasons.

She was soon followed out of the door by Peter Flavel, chief executive of Coutts. Farage also wants NatWest Group’s chairman, Howard Davies, to stand aside.

While Downing Street made clear that Rose could not stay in her post, the government appears to be more protective of Davies. Andrew Griffith, the City minister, said on Friday night that it would not be “helpful” for the NatWest Group’s chairman to quit.

However, Davies is already unpopular with some on the Tory right. He unleashed a stinging criticism of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s disastrous mini-budget in front of hundreds of his staff last year. He explained how he felt “embarrassed” in its aftermath while attending a conference for the International Monetary Fund, the Washington-based lender of last resort.

Farage’s new website is AccountClosed.org, at the bottom of which says:

… Account Closed, a campaign group for individuals and small medium businesses who have been unfairly treated by bank and financial services companies.

The website has a short survey about whether one agrees with current banking practices concerning account closures. Entering one’s email is optional at the bottom of the home page.

This is a huge issue, as over 1,000 British bank accounts are closed every day. Farage rightly says that this is ruining the lives of many, especially small businessmen and women. The shocking statistic was a headline not only at GB News but also The Mail and The Guardian:

On Sunday evening, GB News’s Mark Dolan interviewed Howard Brown, who was the face of the Halifax for several years in television adverts. He had customer-facing and marketing jobs with the bank. He said he was astounded to hear of account closures en masse and said it never occurred when he was in banking. He said the situation is ‘saddening’:

On Monday evening, July 31, Farage opened his GB News show by mentioning the website and had an update on his closed Coutts account:

The Guardian reported that, in his editorial, he said, in part:

Nigel Farage has said that the newly installed boss of Coutts has offered to keep his accounts there open, reversing a decision that triggered a scandal and the resignation of the private bank’s previous chief executive.

The former Ukip leader said he welcomed the offer but was still taking legal action against NatWest, which owns Coutts, demanding compensation, a full apology and a face-to-face meeting with the banking group’s bosses.

Peter Flavel resigned as Coutts chief executive last Thursday, less than two days after the NatWest boss, Alison Rose, also stepped down over her role in the row. Flavel has been replaced by Mohammed Syed.

“The new CEO of Coutts … has written to me to say I can keep both my personal and my business accounts, and that’s good, and I thank him for it,” Farage said on GB News on Monday night.

“But enormous harm has been done to me over the course of the last few months … It has taken up a huge amount of my time and it has cost me, so far, quite a lot of money in legal fees. So I have today sent a legal litigation letter to Coutts, where I want some full apologies, I want some compensation for my cost.

“But more important than all of that, I want a face-to-face meeting with the bank’s bosses. I want to find out how many other people in Coutts or NatWest have had accounts closed because of their political opinions. And I want to make sure this never happens to anybody else ever again” …

Farage did not clarify whether he had accepted Coutts’s offer to keep his account open. NatWest Group said it could not comment on individual customers.

Good!

The article continues:

His comments came hours after the City regulator urged NatWest shareholders, including the UK government, to “choose stability”, suggesting they should resist calls for the group’s chair, Howard Davies, to resign over the ballooning scandal linked to Farage’s accounts …

Farage wants more heads to roll at NatWest – which is still 38.5% government-owned after its 2008 state bailout – but on Monday the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) called for calm.

“The economic secretary to the Treasury [Andrew Griffith] just last week mentioned that he had confidence in Howard Davies, the current chair,” the FCA’s director for consumer matters and competition, Sheldon Mills, said. “I agree with his view that it’s important to have stability at NatWest and that having a chair remain in place will help support that.”

Later, on Dan Wootton’s GB News show, Farage said that Travers Smith, the law firm conducting the review of Farage’s account closures as well as those of others over the past 24 months, had spoken out against Brexit some years ago:

Wootton’s opening editorial was about the bank account closures and Farage’s new website. Afterwards, a panel discussion took place with journalist Carole Malone, Boris’s father Stanley Johnson and Conservative MP Dame Andrea Jenkyns. Jenkyns repeated what she had said the previous Thursday on the show: that her bank account had been closed and she has had problems opening another one. Before that and the editorial (around the 11:00 minute mark), the last news item was about a group of Conservative MPs, one of whom is Iain Duncan Smith, who wrote to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to say that action must be taken against banks closing accounts where customer perspectives do not agree with the banks’:

On Tuesday evening, August 1, Farage interviewed mega multi-millionaire Arron Banks, who was co-founder of the Leave.EU campaign prior to the June 2016 Brexit referendum. He was also a major donor to UKIP and, before that, to the Conservative Party. He owns several businesses in the UK. He had been accused of having close ties to Russia. The story grew and grew. A Guardian journalist published accusations with no concrete evidence; a lawsuit concluded only recently, and she has to pay him damages for defamation.

Because of all this, he had his business bank accounts closed, which he said was a period he said was devastating personally and professionally. Farage asked him why he did not speak out. Banks explained that any businessperson who does will find themselves blacklisted with other financial institutions. A parlous state of affairs:

Bank account closures: what to do

On Monday, August 1, The Telegraph posted ‘Are you at risk of having your bank account closed?’

The article gives the reasons why banks may decide to close accounts. Excerpts follow:

If you are related to, or associated with, a politician or high-profile person there is a fair chance banks will be investigating you, and may decide to close your account.

… you can have your account closed if the bank thinks you are a reputational risk and have differing opinions to its values – which Mr Farage claims were the reasons for Coutts closed his account.

… members of the public who know or associate with high-profile people can also find themselves de-banked, even if they aren’t in the public eye.

This is because banks and other financial institutions are required to apply enhanced due diligence to politically exposed individuals – and people associated with them – to ensure that they are not using their institution for money laundering or accepting cash from illegal sources.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is currently reviewing the rules for politically exposed people, and is set to report back on any changes later this year.

If you have moved to the UK from another country and regularly receive money from abroad – be it from friends or family, or a business – banks may decide to freeze or close your account.

The same could happen if you consistently send large sums of money to overseas accounts …

Banks can be very cautious when dealing with cryptocurrency which, according to recent FCA data, is becoming increasingly popular with younger people.

Cryptocurrencies are unregulated, and as many of the companies that offer this form of currency are based outside of the UK, moving crypto through your account could raise red flags at your bank.

Surprisingly, the same thing can happen when it comes to gambling. There have been claims people have had their accounts shut after receiving deposits of their winnings.

There may be instances where customers are asked to bank elsewhere if their accounts simply are barely used.

Banks have measures in place for converting bank accounts into dormant accounts when they are unused and unable to contact customers for a certain period of time …

Customers should feel empowered to make complaints to their bank when they are unhappy with their service, as long as communications are respectful. Some banks can close an account if a customer is abusive to its staff, either over the phone or in a branch.

While serious issues such as suspected criminal activity should result in the closure of an account, the Treasury and FCA announced they are working on rules to stop bank account closures from happening as frequently …

However, banks are private institutions and, even with the rule changes, can still close a person’s account for various reasons stated above. If the new legislation comes into force, they’ll just have to give you three months’ notice.

I would clarify that last paragraph by saying that the Government — taxpayer, really — still owns 39% of NatWest after the banking crash of 2008. As such, the banking group is not entirely a private institution.

The Telegraph has a helpful article on filing a subject access request — SAR — with one’s bank in the case of frozen or closed accounts: ‘Find out what your bank thinks about you’:

Under the General Data Protection Regulation 2018, everyone has the right to ask an organisation, including a bank, whether or not they are using or storing their personal information.

You can also ask them for copies of your personal information, verbally over the phone or in branch or in writing, through a “right of access” – otherwise known as a SAR.

You can make a SAR request if you want to find out more about what personal information a bank holds about you, how they are using it, who they are sharing it with, and where they got your data from.

A notice on NatWest’s website states that you should be specific in your submission regarding the information you want to obtain from the bank.

This includes whether you want or need a certain call recording with the bank or a copy of a document.

Essentially, the more information you provide in your SAR the easier it will be for your bank to find it in its system and reply promptly.

If you and a joint account holder want to see the information held in that account, both parties should complete and sign a SAR form. One copy of the information held on the account will be issued for the attention of both parties.

After a SAR is submitted your bank will typically respond to your request within 30 days, but more complex requests can take up to 90 days.

A bank will send your information back in PDF form to a verified online bank account, email or via post to a confirmed address.

Disagreement about Sir Howard Davies

Not everyone is so enamoured of NatWest chairman Sir Howard Davies or keen to see him stay on.

On Friday, July 28, The Telegraph‘s chief City commentator Ben Marlow put forward the case against him in ‘NatWest can’t move on with Sir Howard Davies in charge’:

… After the tsunami of criticism that has engulfed the company and the resulting vacuum it has left at the top, some level of reassurance and calm was probably needed. But a “business as usual” approach from those that remain in the boardroom also speaks to the problems at the heart of the organisation.

Interim chief Paul Thwaite says he is “determined we…start to move forward quickly” but the idea that NatWest can do that with Sir Howard still overseeing affairs is desperately naive and suggests the penny still hasn’t dropped at NatWest HQ. Sir Howard has “reflected” on his position and decided – shock horror – that he shouldn’t have to go too.

He should do the honourable thing and step aside now. Having almost fulfilled his full nine-year term anyway and with a search already underway for a successor, what’s the point in hanging around?

Sir Howard says it’s about ensuring stability but I would argue it does the opposite by prolonging the uncertainty and making it impossible to draw a line under the crisis. And what message does it send about how serious the bank is about overhauling its rotten culture, which is what now has to happen?

Sir Howard has already proven that he’s the wrong person to lead any sort of post-mortem into this catastrophic act of self-harm with the risible way in which the board responded throughout, or rather didn’t – at least initially.

Marlow brought a new person into the mix, Lord Remnant, who is the chairman of Coutts:

The 72 year-old [Davies] and his Coutts counterpart Lord Remnant are esteemed City grandees with vast experience of operating at the very highest level of the financial sector.

Sir Howard has worked at the Treasury, been the deputy governor of the Bank of England, and has previously led the predecessor to the Financial Conduct Authority. Remnant was a senior investment banker at Credit Suisse, has been director of the Takeover Panel on two occasions, and was on the board of Northern Rock [which went bust in the 2008 UK banking crash], though a cynic might point to the existence of one or two sizeable red flags in that CV.

Yet, in the face of what is the biggest crisis the bank has faced since the financial crash, the pair have been conspicuous almost entirely by their silence.

Sir Howard kept his head down only until it was obvious that he couldn’t any longer. Yet when his intervention came, he fluffed his lines spectacularly by allowing Rose to issue a nonsensical apology and stay in post.

As the saying goes: “you had one job”. Hours later she was gone – the result of a humiliating dead-of-night intervention by the twin forces of Number Ten and the Treasury no less.

Meanwhile, there hasn’t been a peep from Remnant despite the departure of Flavel 24 hours later. Governance doesn’t come much more meek than this.

Perhaps Sir Howard is hoping that a giant shareholder bung in the form of £500m of dividends and a £500m buyback, £190m of which will go to His Majesty’s government as the bank’s largest shareholder, will buy him some time.

One assumes he has the backing of ministers for now at least but the idea he can hang around until next year, as planned, is plainly nonsense. At the very least, his exit will surely be accelerated by six months …

I hope so.

Lord Remnant

Not having heard of him, I had to look up Lord Remnant.

Philip John Remnant, 68, is the 4th Baron Remnant and a hereditary peer. In a July 2022 House of Lords by-election for hereditary peers, he was elected to replace Lord Brabazon of Tara after his retirement in April that year. Both are Conservatives.

Last Thursday, July 27, The Mail told us much more, although they left out his time at Northern Rock:

Tory peer Lord Remnant took over as Coutts chairman in January after a string of roles in finance and business.

The ‘lifelong Conservative’ was voted into the House of Lords last July, having promised in his candidate statement to ‘commit enthusiastically to the Lords’ after ‘reducing business interests’.

A few months later he was appointed Chairman of Coutts, with NatWest chairman Sir Howard Davies announcing him as an ‘excellent addition’ who would ‘add immense value to guide and inform Coutts business priorities going forward.’

In a speech on the Trophy Hunting bill, Lord Remnant described his ‘natural habitat’ as the ‘financial services jungle’.

He had recently stepped down from water company Severn Trent plc after nine years on the board and retired from the Takeover Panel after 10 years as deputy chair.

Previously, he was Chairman of the City of London Investment Trust plc and of M&G Group Limited.

In his maiden speech in the Lords he said: ‘I followed my father into the City, as a chartered accountant and then an investment banker.

‘Since then, I have sat on the boards of major listed financial services companies and so have long been subject to the rules of our financial regulators.’

Born in 1954, with two brothers and a sister, he attended Saint Ronan’s School in Hawkshurst, Kent – the same school as his father, the previous Lord Remnant.

The article also gives us more information on Peter Flavel:

Australian-born banker, Coutts chief executive Peter Flavel, took the helm in 2016 after working for Standard Chartered’s Private Bank and JP Morgan.

Born to pub-owing parents, he studied law, economics and commerce at university near his childhood home in Adelaide and Melbourne – he has also attended the Advanced Management Programme at both Harvard Business School and the University of Oxford – before taking a job at National Australia Bank.

In 2006, he moved to Singapore to run Standard Chartered’s Private Bank, then switched to JP Morgan’s wealth management arm.

Last year, there were increasing signs that Mr Flavel, who turned 63 on Tuesday, was becoming increasingly enamoured with issues such as inclusivity and climate change.

The executive shared posts about ‘benefitting the environment and people of all identities and backgrounds.’

‘Each and every one of us has the power to create change,’ he says on the bank’s website.

In an interview in 2019, he revealed he was an adherent to working from home before it became the norm, saying he liked to do so once a month at his West London flat, which the father-of-three shared with wife Ally.

‘Sitting there on our little balcony overlooking the garden fills you with so many new ideas,’ he said.

I bet it does.

No doubt he had a cheery lockdown period during the pandemic, while others, without the privilege of a back garden or a balcony, were told to stay at home, without even so much as a walk to a park.

Why banks are closing accounts

Anti-money laundering laws in the UK are very strict and banks spend a lot of money monitoring certain accounts. If memory serves me correctly, they spend £150 for every £1 they discover is laundered. Therefore, it is much cheaper to close suspected accounts than to keep them open.

Ironically, it was NatWest which was responsible for a landmark case involving money laundering.

On December 13, 2021, the BBC reported:

NatWest has been fined £265m after admitting it failed to prevent money-laundering of nearly £400m by one firm.

A gold trading business suspected of money-laundering deposited £700,000 in cash into one NatWest branch in black bin bags, a court heard on Monday.

A criminal gang deposited huge sums of cash across about 50 branches, prosecutors for the UK’s financial watchdog said.

NatWest said it deeply regrets failing to monitor the customer properly.

It is the first time a financial institution has faced criminal prosecution by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) under anti-money laundering laws in the UK.

The fine would have been much higher, but it was reduced because the bank had pleaded guilty, the judge said at the sentencing hearing …

The bank’s chief executive Alison Rose said: “NatWest takes its responsibility to prevent and detect financial crime extremely seriously.

“We deeply regret that we failed to adequately monitor one of our customers between 2012 and 2016 for the purpose of preventing money-laundering.”

How this happened beggars belief. It would make a great movie:

Bradford jewellers Fowler Oldfield’s predicted annual turnover when taken on as a client by NatWest was £15m. But it deposited about £365m over five years, including £264m in cash.

The company, which was shut down following a police raid in 2016, was initially marked as “high-risk”, but that was downgraded in December 2013.

The FCA’s lawyer Clare Montgomery said there “was a rapid escalation in the amount of cash” being deposited from November 2013, with figures reaching up to £1.8m a day. By 2014, Fowler Oldfield was NatWest’s “single most lucrative” client in the Bradford area.

Southall received about £42m in cash between January 2015 and March 2016, for example, but no report was made that it was suspicious.

That is despite lawyers saying earlier on Monday that one person in Walsall arrived at a branch with so much cash, packed in bin-liners, that they broke and the money had to be repacked.

Ms Montgomery added that the cash did not even fit in the branch’s floor-to-ceiling safes.

NatWest did not properly look into numerous warnings generated by its systems, the FCA lawyer said earlier on Monday.

One rule designed to flag suspicious activity was disabled by the bank because it created too many alerts, “so the bank decided it should be deactivated”, Ms Montgomery added, while NatWest also recorded cash deposits by Fowler Oldfield as cheques between 2008 and March 2017.

The National Crime Agency also raised concerns at one point because of the high number of Scottish banknotes being deposited in England, the court heard.

And a NatWest cash centre in north-eastern England raised queries about Scottish banknotes, saying that they had a “musty smell”, suggesting they might have been stored rather than in normal circulation.

The state-backed bank was “in no way complicit in the money-laundering which took place”, the judge said at Southwark Crown Court on Monday.

But they added: “Without the bank’s failings, the money could not have been laundered.”

Sara George, partner at Sidley and a former prosecutor for the Financial Services Authority, told the BBC that it was clear there were failings at every level.

“It’s hard to imagine a much more clear indication of criminal proceeds than black bin-liners of money. It’s extraordinary,” she said.

She added that the “landmark” case showed that the UK’s financial watchdog was “committed to using a fuller spread of its enforcement powers” to stop money-laundering, which she described as “anything but a victimless crime”.

Luckily for Alison Rose, ESG saved her — until Coutts closed Farage’s accounts.

The Telegraph explains in ‘How Britain turned against self-righteous bosses’:

Dame Alison Rose had a spring in her step as she greeted NatWest staff and shareholders in April [2023].

Speaking at an annual gathering at the bank’s sprawling headquarters on the outskirts of Edinburgh, the chief executive had recently received one of the highest awards in the King’s first honours list.

She was also the first NatWest boss to get an annual bonus since the financial crisis.

Since winning the top job in 2019, Dame Alison had been feted not just for her banking nous but for championing corporate “values” and “purpose”, buzzwords embraced heartily by fellow blue chip executives.

“Our values are at the heart of how we deliver our purpose-led strategy,” she told the gathering.

Under her leadership, NatWest had come to describe itself as “a relationship bank for a digital world”. Its values are “being inclusive, curious, robust, sustainable and ambitious”.

They are laudable aims. Yet these same values would be Dame Alison’s undoing, as they were applied in ways she may never have imagined.

In a now widely reported dossier first revealed by The Telegraph, overzealous employees at Coutts, a private bank and subsidiary of NatWest, explained at length why they believed the group’s inclusion or “ESG” (environmental, social and governance) policies meant they should no longer provide services to Nigel Farage …

It is a fiasco that has thrust corporate values and so-called “woke capitalism” into the spotlight, underlining the risks companies can expose themselves to when they wade into politics and social causes …

… the birth of the modern ESG movement has been credited to a paper published by the United Nations in 2004. “Who Cares, Wins” claimed that companies applying these principles were not just doing the right thing but also made themselves more competitive.

The ideas have gained traction in the C-suite ever since, as big businesses seek to downplay the “greed is good” culture that critics blamed for the financial crisis.

Perhaps no British bank embodied this transformation as much as NatWest, previously known as Royal Bank of Scotland.

Under former chief executive Fred “the Shred” Goodwin – dubbed “Britain’s most notorious banker” – RBS embarked on a global takeover spree, briefly making it the world’s biggest bank before it crashed spectacularly. It was bailed out in 2008 to the tune of £46bn in taxpayer cash, and Goodwin became a lightning rod for public anger.

By contrast, Dame Alison’s public image could not have been further from Goodwin’s. A bank lifer who joined as a trainee, she spent years patiently climbing the corporate ladder and, later, cleaning up the disgraced investment banking division of RBS.

When she succeeded Ross McEwan as chief executive a year later, she immediately set about replacing the RBS brand with the less toxic NatWest one, while launching a company-wide process to find the lender’s “purpose”.

“I truly believe that if you are going to lead an organisation and create an organisation that has value over the long-term, it has to be purpose-led,” she told the Blueprint for Better Business podcast last month …

But as the ESG movement has grown, and a cottage industry of consultants, spinners and auditors have sprung up around it, so too have the risks of companies getting things wrong.

How true. In other words, ‘go woke, go broke’. The article has several other examples, from Unilever to Mars confectionery.

The view from Ireland

And, finally, we have an expression of gratitude from Ireland for Nigel Farage’s heroic efforts in the bank account closure debacle from Gript‘s John McGuirk:

… he has been unwilling to make any compromises in order to be liked by the sort of people who despise the things he believes in. In this case, for example, the easier thing would undoubtedly have been to say nothing and find a new bank – but by refusing to go quietly, it has ended up being the Natwest CEO, Dame Alison Rose, who needs to find herself a new bank.

And the Farage row has won a victory not only for himself, but for others: Because if they can’t do it to Nigel Farage, the architect of Brexit and just about everything else that people like Fintan O’Toole consider to be pestilent, then it has become much harder to do it to any of the rest of us.

There is no doubt in my mind, for example, that had they gotten away with doing what they did to Nigel Farage, then just about anyone prominent who stubbornly hangs onto the view that men and women are born, not assigned, would have found themselves without a bank in short order. The same would be true of anyone in Ireland prominently associated with protests about immigration.

That, after all, is how society works now: The ruling liberal order is maintained through a strict regime of incentives and punishments. If you want to keep your job and your nice life, keep your mouth shut.

We owe Farage for challenging that, and preserving the very essence of what it is supposed to be to live in a free society: The right to say loudly and proudly, without fear of punishment, that the people who are ruling your country are buffoons …

Farage has always been hated precisely because he punctures that and appeals to something more enduring: The common wisdom of the ordinary person who knows that what they are hearing is nonsense, but lacks the confidence to argue with “experts agree”. That, above all, is why they hate him, and why they try to shut him up at every opportunity.

It is also why, as in this case, he keeps winning. Lest this sound like an homage, there are many things this writer differs from Farage on – Brexit being just one. But in Farage versus Natwest, as in so many things before, he has once again shown that his existence is something for which every true democrat should be thankful.

If they’d gotten away with doing this to him, the rest of us were next in line.

Well said!

I will be moving on to other topics this week, so I hope this will be the last banking post for a while.

Coutts CEO Peter Flavel resigns, NatWest chairman Howard Davies vows to stay

July 28, 2023 in history | Tags: 2023, Ben Habib, commercial banking, Daily Telegraph, Dame Alison Rose, Dan Wootton, David GH Frost, David Starkey, England, ESG, GB News, Guido Fawkes, history, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Lord Moylan, Michelle Dewberry, Nigel Farage, Paul Thwaite, Peter Flavel, Sir Howard Davies, The Guardian, UK, video | 3 comments

My ongoing series on Nigel Farage’s bank account debacle continues.

Congratulations to him, because not only did Dame Alison Rose resign as the head of NatWest, but the head of their subsidiary Coutts, Peter Flavel, resigned on Thursday, July 27, 2023.

I wrote about Dame Alison Rose’s resignation yesterday. Paul Thwaite has replaced her as interim NatWest CEO.

Little did I know that more news would follow that afternoon.

Peter Flavel resigns

Yesterday, I wrote:

The Times‘s view — the main editorial — also points the finger at Coutts’s chief Peter Flavel, who has managed to keep an exceedingly low profile throughout all of this …

As usual, Guido Fawkes beat many in the mainstream media in giving us breaking news.

At 14:11 on Thursday, he posted ‘Coutts CEO Peter Flavel Resigns’ (red emphases his):

Coutts chief executive Peter Flavel has resigned, less than 48 hours after his boss Alison Rose also quit for briefing false information – and breaching client confidentiality – to the BBC about Nigel Farage’s finances. He announced the inevitable this afternoon:

In the handling of Mr Farage’s case we have fallen below the bank’s high standards of personal service. As CEO of Coutts it is right that I bear ultimate responsibility for this, which is why I am stepping down.

Another scalp for Nigel…

Guido later posted Farage’s tweet at the news:

It was only a matter of time before Peter Flavel, Coutts CEO, stood down.

The ultimate responsibility for the dossier de-banking me for my political views lies with him.

I even wrote to Mr Flavel twice before going public and didn’t receive an acknowledgment.

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) July 27, 2023

Guido ended his post with this:

NatWest Group chairman Howard Davies is still clinging to his job. For now…

Davies: political reaction forced “great leader” Alison Rose out

… He told reporters:

We took the view on Tuesday that even though mistakes had been made, it was on balance right to retain Alison Rose as our CEO.

But the reaction was such as to convince her and the board that her position was untenable.

Davies added that:

I clearly regret the way things have turned out. We’ve lost a great leader as a result, but I now have to look forward.

He was only sorry they got caught!

Also at 8:26:

When asked whether Farage’s accounts at Coutts had been reinstated, Howard Davies says it is “not appropriate for me to speak about the state of his accounts”.

At 8:39:

… Howard Davies says the bank always has an emergency plan ready for unexpected departure.

This plan was considered a few months ago, and NatWest decided Thwaite was the right person to be emergency successor.

This was discussed with Paul himself, Howard Davies says; Thwaite obviously wasn’t expecting this to happen, but was prepared to take the role on.

This position was also discussed with regulators, Davies adds, as they would expect a bank to have a succession plan in place.

At 8:43:

Davies says NatWest’s independent review into the closure of Nigel Farage’s Coutts account will have three dimensions.

It will cover: the decision to close the accounts of Mr Farage; the circumstances around the BBC article (which initially said it was a commercial decision); and to review other Coutts account closures.

At 8:45:

And with regards to the Financial Conduct Authority’s involvement on the Farage bank account debacle, Howard Davies confirms the regulator have raised concerns with the bank.

With regard to account closures, these issues should be independently reviewed; we can certainly assure that will happen, Davies adds.

At 9:02:

NatWest is also asked about Alison Rose’s exit pay, following reports that she could receive a ‘multi-million-pound pay-off’.

Howard Davies says he can’t say precisely when details of the package will be published, explaining:

The independent review will take place and then we’ll have to consider it.

Davies adds that he doesn’t see a reason to depart from the normal practice of reporting executive pay.

He also explained, earlier in the call, that decisions on Rose’s pay can’t be made until the independent review has been completed.

At 9:19:

NatWest has appointed law firm Travers Smith to independently probe its handling of the Farage affair, our City editor Anna Isaac explains.

… One of its more sensitive tasks will be to put a spotlight on the circumstances and nature of any leaks to the press, and what confidential information may have been passed from the banking group to the media, including the BBC.

Beyond the handling of Farage’s accounts, the probe will also look at all accounts closed at Coutts over the past 24 months. It will follow a similar approach as with the Farage-specific investigation: looking at questions of how and why accounts were shut, and what was said to all other customers whose accounts were shut down.

And on a related topic, albeit with a different bank, this news emerged at 10:41:

Politicians on the right of the political spectrum aren’t the only ones to fall victim to ‘debanking’, it seems.

According to the BBC, anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller was told a bank account for her political party would close without explanation.

The BBC reports:

Monzo initially refused to tell Ms Miller why her “True and Fair” party account would be closed in September.

After the BBC contacted the bank about the case, it said it did not allow political party accounts and had made a mistake in allowing it to be opened.

Monzo said it recognised the experience would have been “frustrating for the customer and we’re sorry for that”.

More here.

At 13:12, we learned that the Bank of England is bringing in Ben Bernanke to review its dismal forecasting:

Newsflash: Dr Ben Bernanke, the former head of America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, is to lead a review into the Bank of England’s forecasting.

The BoE says the review will aim to “develop and strengthen” the Bank’s support for the Monetary Policy Committee’s approach to forecasting and monetary policy making in times of uncertainty.

This follows criticism that the Bank failed to predict the surge in inflation over the last year or two, meaning it was too slow to tighten monetary policy by raising interest rates …

A month ago, the Bank’s chief economist, Huw Pill, said the Bank’s forecasting models became become “unworkable” in the current crisis, as they failed to fully appreciate the the interaction of high energy prices and a tight jobs market.

At 14:29:

Farage supports Gina Miller over bank account access

The row over access to UK bank accounts is creating some unlikely alliances.

Nigel Farage has thrown his backing behind anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller, after it emerged this morning that Monzo bank is to close the bank account of Miller’s True and Fair party.

Farage says he stands with Miller, who famously challenged the UK government in 2016 over its authority to trigger the process of leaving the European Union without parliamentary approval.

Miller warned this morning that “we don’t have a functioning democracy” if new political parties cannot access banking services.

This is just plain wrong at every level. I stand with @thatginamiller. https://t.co/cK1GcCRjcE

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) July 28, 2023

At 14:53:

Nils Pratley: It will be surprising if NatWest’s Howard Davies hasn’t gone by Christmas

Can Howard Davies cling onto the top job on the NatWest board until 2024?

Our financial editor, Nils Pratley, thinks not – even though Davies himself hoped to hang on until July 2024, before the Farage bank row blew up.

Nils writes:

Davies has probably escaped the need for an instant resignation only by virtue of the fact that he was going anyway. Plan A, which pre-dates the Coutts fiasco, was for him to leave by July next year for the conventional reason that his nine-year term will be up at that point. An obvious strategy now would be to accelerate the timetable and get out as soon as is practical.

Since the search for a new chair has already been running for a few weeks, it should not take ages to find a new face, even if the pool of likely volunteers may have shrunk over the past week. One suspects Davies will want to be out in the autumn, or at least to have named his successor by then. And it will be amazing if he’s still there by Christmas. Under a new chair the necessary broader overhaul of the boardroom after the incompetence of the past month can begin.

I hope Nils Pratley is right. GB News has reported that Davies does not have the Prime Minister’s support.

At 15:09:

… NatWest cut its forecast for its net interest margin (the gap between what it charges borrowers and pays savers); a sign that some people have been running down their savings or moving them to more lucrative accounts …

Hmm.

Is this yet another case of ‘go woke, go broke’?

We shall see.

For now, I have one more banking post to come next week.

Farage’s bank account saga: following NatWest CEO’s departure, could more heads roll?

July 27, 2023 in history | Tags: 2023, commercial banking, Daily Telegraph, Dame Alison Rose, Dan Wootton, England, GB News, history, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nigel Farage, Peter Flavel, Sir Howard Davies, The Times, UK, video | 7 comments

Yesterday, I wrote at length about Dame Alison Rose’s departure from the NatWest Group.

Opinions in print and on air continued into the evening and into Thursday morning, July 27, 2023.

Rose loses government appointments

Christian Calgie, a Guido Fawkes alumnus who now writes for The Express, told us ‘Humiliated Alison Rose sacked from two major Downing Street roles’ (purple emphases mine):

The now-former CEO of NatWest has suffered yet more career setbacks this morning, as the Government confirms she’s been ditched as a top advisor.

Dame Alison Rose had been appointed to an Energy Efficiency Taskforce within the Net Zero department in February and as a member of the PM’s Business Council just last week.

The Express understands she’s now been let go from both positions.

A No. 10 spokesperson said: “Following her resignation as CEO of NatWest Group, the Government has confirmed that Dame Alison Rose is no longer a member of the Prime Minister’s Business Council.”

Separately, a spokesperson for the Department for Net Zero has told the Express: “Following the news overnight, the Secretary of State has asked Dame Alison Rose to step down from her roles as co-chair of the Energy Efficiency Taskforce and as a Member of the Net Zero Council and she has resigned” …

Just last week she was also pictured laughing with Rishi Sunak at Downing Street, where she had been invited as part of the launch of Rishi Sunak’s new Business Council to help “turbocharge economic growth”.

At the time, Dame Alison said: “Partnership between government and business is the cornerstone of a sustainable growth economy.”.

“That’s why I’m delighted to be part of the Prime Minister’s Business Council for 2023. Working together we can face into the nation’s challenges to unlock investment, drive enterprise, grasp the opportunity of climate transition and ultimately, help UK economy to thrive.”

Dame Alison’s fate appeared sealed late last night after both Rishi Sunak, Jeremy Hunt and multiple Cabinet Ministers let it be known they had either lost faith in her continuing in the role or had serious concerns …

Political pressure forced the NatWest board, which had only hours before declared confidence in their CEO, to reconvene, leading to her resignation in the early hours.

The Government should encourage her to give up her damehood. She does not deserve it.

Early on Thursday, The Times reported that Rose could receive a whopping year’s salary. Sadly, this will surprise no one:

Dame Alison Rose’s departure from NatWest was under fresh scrutiny last night after it emerged she may be in line for a multimillion-pound payoff.

The 54-year-old chief executive left her position at the bank by “mutual consent” over the Nigel Farage debanking scandal. Her resignation was announced after a late-night board meeting, convened when Downing Street, the chancellor and other senior cabinet ministers put pressure on her to quit.

Analysts said the fact that Rose had agreed with the board to leave with immediate effect suggested she would receive pay in lieu of working notice. NatWest’s annual report indicates that the bank can make a payment in lieu of 12 months’ notice, signalling that she is in line to receive a year’s salary.

Rose’s pay package last year was £5.25 million, which included a £1.1 million base salary and the same amount again in shares, as well as an annual bonus and performance-related stock awards. NatWest had indicated that it would look to curb parts of Rose’s pay after she admitted leaking confidential information about Farage to the BBC.

NatWest declined to comment on her payoff, but sources said its stance remained the same, suggesting the bank would look to limit her remuneration.

Farage told The Times: “She should not be getting a payoff at all. She has breached the most basic rule of banking and brought the NatWest group into disrepute. It’s a reward for failure.”

My concerns are a) what will she do next and b) how soon will she take up another job? If I were a NatWest decision maker, I would put in writing that she cannot work for twelve months. If she does, she would have to return the payout they gave her. (Personally, I don’t think she should get anything, but the world doesn’t work the way it should.)

These were the final hours before her resignation early on Wednesday:

An hour-long virtual meeting between board members ended the 31-year NatWest career of Dame Alison Rose.

The hastily convened 10pm conference came less than five hours after Sir Howard Davies, the NatWest group chairman, had pledged the board’s “full support” to its beleaguered chief executive. But the members decided she had to go and released a statement, with words from both Davies and Rose, confirming the news at 1.29am …

The final blow was the revelation that Rishi Sunak, the prime minister, and Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, had significant concerns about her remaining in her job. Behind the scenes there was a flurry of calls between senior government officials and the bank to relay a similar message.

Andrew Griffith, City minister, pressed on the late-night exchange of views, said: “There’s always a dialogue between typically Treasury officials and senior people in all of the big major banks. The prime minister and the chancellor have been clear throughout about the principle at stake here, which is that nobody should have their bank account removed as a result of something they’ve said or something that they believe in.”

When questioned over whether he had put in a call to NatWest, Griffith added: “I’m not going to comment on individual conversations that may have happened over the last 24 hours.” He said it was right that Rose had stepped down.

The political fallout from the earlier statement had prompted the NatWest board to reconvene. Then came the early morning U-turn confirmation.

The 1.29am statement said that Rose had agreed to step down by mutual consent and appointed Paul Thwaite, CEO of the bank’s commercial and institutional business, to take over.

[NatWest chairman Sir Howard] Davies, still defending his colleague, said: “It is a sad moment. She has dedicated all her working life so far to NatWest and will leave many colleagues who respect and admire her.”

More about him below.

On Wednesday, British banks were read the riot act by City Minister Andrew Griffith MP:

Leaders from Britain’s biggest banks admitted yesterday that the Farage debanking fiasco had tarnished the sector’s reputation with the public as they were hauled into a meeting with the City minister, Andrew Griffith. Griffith told banking chiefs, including those from NatWest, HSBC, Lloyds, Barclays and Nationwide, that the idea a customer could be debanked over their views was “wholly unacceptable”.

Also:

The Information Commissioner’s Office has announced an investigation into whether any rules were broken. NatWest shares fell 3.7 per cent yesterday.

The Telegraph had more on the Information Commissioner’s Office in ‘NatWest may have broken the law over Farage Coutts scandal’:

On Wednesday, senior Conservative MPs demanded that Dame Alison forgo any severance pay. The bank declined to say whether she will receive an exit package.

John Edwards, the information commissioner, said on Wednesday: “The banking duty of confidentiality is over a hundred years old, and it is clear that it would not permit the discussion of a customer’s personal information with the media.

“We trust banks with our money and with our personal information. Any suggestion that this trust has been betrayed will be concerning for a bank’s customers, and for regulators like myself.”

The ICO said that if the bank could not resolve a complaint made by Mr Farage, it would begin its own inquiries.

Mr Edwards warned banks against holding excessive information on their customers after The Telegraph revealed NatWest had accumulated a 40-page dossier on Mr Farage to feed back to its Wealth Reputational Risk Committee. That dossier could be in breach of data protection rules …

The ICO can bring criminal prosecutions, although it is more likely that NatWest would face a civil penalty, sources said.

It can issue fines of up to four per cent of a company’s worldwide turnover, which in the case of NatWest could run into hundreds of millions of pounds.

GB News reaction

Nigel Farage devoted the bulk of his show to Wednesday’s developments:

While Farage was happy that Rose resigned, he said in his editorial that Sir Howard Davies and the board of directors should also stand down. He also said that he would be developing a website dedicated to people who have had their bank accounts closed for no good reason. Former Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng was Farage’s first guest. Kwarteng said that banks’ targeting of individuals and closing their accounts is something new and he was not aware of it until recently, especially with small businesses. He was grateful that Farage is shining a light on this parlous business practice. Conservative MP Royston Smith was the next guest. He said that TSB had closed his account a year ago for no apparent reason then had the affrontery to send him a cheque for the balance. He had nowhere to cash it, so he tried to contact the bank to no avail. It was only when he tweeted recently about his situation that TSB finally contacted him. The situation is still unresolved.

Afterwards came a vox pop. GB News had interviewed people working in the City of London, the financial centre. The verdict was about 50/50 on Rose’s resignation. Some, including a lot of Europeans, said that it was an overreaction. Britons, however, by and large, said it was the right thing to do. Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle, not a natural fit with Farage, appeared next. His name has not helped people with whom he has been associated. A charity reluctantly told him he could not be associated with them because he is too controversial, or so their bank thought, and his lodgers (renters) have had the same experience with their banks, one of which was Santander. He will support Farage’s quest to stop this happening.

Countess Alexandra Tolstoy came on next. I discussed her case in my July 12 post, and she related much the same to Farage. Here again, NatWest was the culprit. The Times featured her story today, Thursday, July 27. Farage’s last segment concerned the mysterious case of a bank branch in Reading, Berkshire, found guilty of mishandling loans to medium-sized businesses. The bank in question, HBOS owned by Lloyds, agreed to lend them money. Once a company had spent the money, the bank would call in the loan, forcing the company to go bankrupt. The bank then got the assets of that company and made millions. This happened during David Cameron’s and Theresa May’s premierships. A cabinet secretary said he would look into it and then said he had been advised not to talk to former Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner Anthony Stansfeld who had raised the issue with him. Stansfeld told Farage this scam was well into the hundreds of millions of pounds. The Prime Ministers did not want to know. The network also involved other banks in other cities, but their police forces ignored the story. Stansfeld said it took three years to solve the case, held before a jury, and put things to right thanks to the chief constable. It seems part of this investigation is still ongoing in Bristol, where Lloyds says it is still investigating, but, for now, denies any wrongdoing.

Jacob Rees-Mogg was next:

The discussion about Farage’s bank account started at the 20:21 mark. Rees-Mogg said that taxpayers lost £325m that day on Rose’s resignation. A former Coutts employee, Oliver Lewis was a guest. He had left the bank to write a biography of George Orwell, oddly enough. Lewis left in 2015 when Rose was appointed the head of wealth management. He was amazed to find out that all this had happened, because she was so professional and diplomatic.

Toby Young of the Free Speech Union took issue with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) complaining about the Government urging Rose’s resignation. This is because Farage had no due process; Coutts’s decision, Young said, was overridden by ideology. Oliver Lewis said that he used to write meeting minutes but never would have written Farage’s report in such a brusque way with so many accusations. Conversation then turned to Brexit Derangement Syndrome — Rees-Mogg’s words — about Nigel and Boris Johnson. Toby Young said that unwarrented bank account closures could happen to anyone. He praised Keir Starmer for finally condemning Coutts’s conduct in this affair. Rees-Mogg wondered what would happen if former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn had been debanked.

All hoped that banking would return to normal soon. Lewis said that banking at NatWest is not 100% commercial because of the government bailout after the 2008 banking crisis — the taxpayer still owns 39% of the banking group — but also because government basically guarantees banking rights, at least in principle.

Dan Wootton devoted two segments to the Farage farrago.

In his editorial, he said it is important that people continue to speak up about it, otherwise we will be walking into enforced personal silence and control. He said that the criticisms of GB News are actually criticisms of the majority of the British people. Like Trump was for many Americans, GB News was ‘only in the way’. The people are the target:

Wootton also spoke with The Telegraph‘s Celia Walden — Mrs Piers Morgan — who finds the situation appalling. She thinks our banks’ social policy practices came over from the United States:

On Thursday morning, Spiked‘s Fraser Myers told the channel’s Breakfast show that Coutts probably thought it was doing its notional duty by closing Farage’s account, which, he said, was ‘a scary thing’:

What this mean for the future of ESG?

On Thursday, The Times posted ‘What does the Farage v Coutts row mean for ESG?’

Opinions in the legal world are divided, but law firms and other businesses have been moving towards ESG in recent years:

For some commentators it was only a matter of time that unbridled enthusiasm for the creation of standards for ethical corporate behaviour backfired. Even at the end of 2021 litigation was emerging around ESG that involved arguments over the boundaries of liability.

Nonetheless, the ESG bandwagon has continued to collect passengers, including many prominent law firms. In February the Anglo-US law firm DLA Piper was placed top of an inaugural ESG league table for the legal profession compiled by Impactvise, a consultancy that specialises in corporate ethics. The consultancy, which is based in Switzerland, was founded by two lawyers: Yannick Hausmann and Adrian Peyer, both of whom had worked at Zurich Insurance.

Impactvise certainly talks the ESG talk, saying that “legal service providers — particularly, lawyers at law firms and in-house corporate counsels — are key players in the modern value chain, and have a unique position to support the move towards a sustainable future”. But with rumblings that Farage could take legal action against Coutts over its approach to him and his account, many law firms may be having second thoughts about how closely they want to stand next to their clients’ ESG schemes, or indeed whether they should have their own.

Jean-Pierre Douglas-Henry, the managing director of sustainability and resilience at DLA Piper, acknowledges the conundrum. He says: “Businesses are increasingly being asked by policymakers to be aware of the impact of sustainability issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss.

“In some countries businesses are being required by law to factor these risks into their operations at every level, while in others they are just waking up to the risks involved.”

Others argue that it is wrong to label Farage’s row with Coutts as having its roots in the ESG movement. “The issue in the Farage case is that a risk-based decision about a politically exposed person had nothing at all to do with ESG and corporate values . . . and yet Coutts appears to have conflated the two things,” says Michael Evans, a former head of communications at Baker McKenzie in London and now a director at Byfield, a litigation and reputation consultancy.

Evans argues that Coutts’s risk committee was “very selective in identifying Farage as posing a reputational risk to the bank and its inclusive values when you look at some of its other current and former clients. In dropping Farage as a client, this was an example of virtue signalling gone too far by Coutts” …

The Coutts case is also interesting because of Farage’s use of a subject access request under freedom of information law to get a report from Coutts’s reputational risk committee used to justify the closure. Tony Williams, a former Clifford Chance managing partner who is now the director of the legal profession consultancy Jomati, says that the use of that facility represents a “ticking time bomb that many organisations may have if they prepare profiles of their customers”.

Williams speculates that law firms “will become rather more circumspect as to certain clients they act for, but inevitably will make some commercial decisions and recognise the reality that if every client was perfect they probably wouldn’t need lawyers very much”.

As to whether the Farage-Coutts saga will hole ESG below the waterline, Evans is doubtful. “That is not to say the anti-ESG backlash isn’t real, but the legal sector’s view to date has very much been that a firm must have its own house in order so that they can be taken seriously by big corporate clients grappling with ESG-related issues,” he says. “This view seems unlikely to change any time soon.”

Ben Marlow, The Telegraph‘s chief City commentator, says ‘The NatWest debacle exposes the bone-headedness of corporate moralising’:

There needs to be a thorough rethink of the bank’s pious posing and how its devotion to the corporate “purpose” movement led it to make such a series of terrible decisions.

The bone-headedness of corporate moralising is as much to blame for this debacle as the poor judgement of senior executives. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that the bank would ever have picked a fight with the former UKIP leader in the first place if it hadn’t well and truly disappeared down a rabbit hole of hypocrisy.

This is an organisation that harps on endlessly about diversity and inclusion, yet went to great lengths to come up with reasons to dissolve its relationship with one person on the basis that his personal views didn’t fit with their interpretation of the world. What could be less inclusive than that?

As Farage correctly points out, the problem with so much of the Ethical, Social and Governance (ESG) fanaticism that companies have been captured by is that our values and the politics that underpin them are, erm, diverse.

And because ESG is essentially an ideological leap of faith, its most committed proponents struggle to accept anyone challenging their stance.

The experience of Reverend Richard Fothergill is no less troubling than Farage’s. The clergyman was allegedly de-banked by Yorkshire Building Society after 17 years as an account holder for asking its customer services department whether promotion of LGBT causes was a good use of its time …

Banks have turned contempt into an art form and suspicions of profiteering during a cost of living crunch are hard to avoid. Customers want rip-off charges to end, and fairer savings rates, particularly when they’ve suddenly found themselves on a mortgage that is no longer even remotely affordable …

If NatWest is to recover quickly from this damaging episode it needs to abandon the moral crusade and rediscover – yet again – the old-fashioned and boring business of being a bank.

On Thursday morning, The Telegraph reported that NatWest and Barclays received the most complaints about account closures:

NatWest was the subject of the joint most complaints over decisions to close bank accounts last year, data show, a day after its boss resigned following a scandal over the closure of Nigel Farage’s Coutts account.

Customers complained about NatWest and rival Barclays 274 times each in 2022/23, figures supplied to Bloomberg showed. This includes cases linked to NatWest’s Royal Bank of Scotland brand.

The data from the Financial Ombudsman Service, the independent body that settles issues between customers and lenders, show NatWest was the most complained-about bank for the past three years in terms of account closures, although the absolute number for all the lenders is a fraction of the millions of accounts they each service.

It comes after Dame Alison Rose resigned on Wednesday after discussing Mr Farage’s account with a BBC journalist, wiping £850m off the value of the lender.

Should the NatWest board go?

It isn’t just Nigel Farage saying that Sir Howard Davies and NatWest’s board of directors should go.

On Thursday, The Times posted ‘Investor’s ire at “appalling” bank board’:

In a blistering broadside, Martin Walker, head of UK equities at Invesco, a NatWest shareholder, said, “there is clearly a problem in this business with governance.

“Frankly, I am appalled at both management and board behaviour in this whole episode. NatWest is a good business that has many strengths and when the governance isn’t robust within a business, then those strengths will never be reflected in the share price.”

Walker’s intervention increases the pressure on Sir Howard Davies, the bank’s chairman, who already faces scrutiny over the chaotic departure of Rose, the lender’s chief executive …

“Her role was clearly untenable,” Walker said. “You have to call into question the judgment of the board here” …

Walker said the Farage affair raised concerns beyond Rose’s departure. Invesco owns a stake in NatWest worth about £128 million, a portion of which is managed by Walker.

Davies, apparently, was already scheduled to leave NatWest:

A source at the bank insisted that Davies, who was already due to step down by the middle of next year, had “absolutely engaged” with the government. NatWest shares fell by 9½p, or 3.7 per cent, to close at 241¾p yesterday as investors digested the developments.

Alistair Osborne, one of The Times‘s business columnists, predicts ‘NatWest clearout looms after Farage fiasco’:

The taxpayer owns 39 per cent of NatWest, the continuing legacy of 2008’s £45.5 billion bailout in the lender’s previous guise as Royal Bank of Scotland. So didn’t Davies check whether the board’s contentious backing of Rose had the support of No 10 and No 11? Apparently he did speak to senior individuals in the Treasury more than once in the 24 hours before Tuesday’s 5.45pm announcement. But there must have been some horribly crossed wires.

No sooner was the bank’s ludicrous statement out than The Times found the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, had significant concerns. Ditto three other cabinet ministers. One delivered some home truths: that Rose has “no integrity”, the chairman has “lost his credibility” and “the whole board has got to go if it wants to defend her”.

The upshot? A screeching U-turn at 1.30am with Rose going by “mutual consent”, replaced for an initial 12 months by commercial chief Paul Thwaite. Davies called it a “sad moment”. It is for the contrite boss, who’d worked for the bank for more than 30 years and whose as-yet undisclosed payoff may still stoke fresh controversy. But, with the Financial Conduct Authority and Information Commissioner’s Office poking around, a row over debanking clients and Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer agreeing she had to go, her position was untenable. The shares fell 3.7 per cent to 241¾p.

As for Davies, who’s on his way out anyway, his judgment has proved a throwback to the days when, as director of the London School of Economics, he accepted a £300,000 donation from a foundation run by Colonel Gaddafi’s son. The rest of the board — mainly a bunch of bankers, including Mark Seligman, ex of Credit Suisse, as the senior independent director — have also shown themselves incapable of governing a bank. Farage reckons they should all go. Again, he’s right. After this fiasco, a clearout looms.

Alistair Osborne’s colleagues, Dominic O’Connell and Emma Duncan, gave their views in ‘Fiasco in the boardroom: Times writers’ verdicts on Alison Rose’s resignation’.

Dominic O’Connell says:

given what has happened with Rose a wider shake-up of the board is likely.

Emma Duncan says in the aftermath of Rose’s resignation:

The question now is whether Sir Howard Davies, the bank’s chairman, will survive …

The Financial Conduct Authority has demanded an independent review of Rose’s actions, and says ominously that it “will decide if any further action is necessary”.

Davies, however, said that the board had “full confidence” in her. That was, frankly, bizarre.

The Times‘s view — the main editorial — also points the finger at Coutts’s chief Peter Flavel, who has managed to keep an exceedingly low profile throughout all of this:

Also in the crosshairs for this debacle, together with the NatWest chairman, Sir Howard Davies, is Peter Flavel, head of Coutts. His company profile lauds him for making the image of the inclusive-yet-exclusive cash warehouse “more warm and modern”.

GB News’s hedge fund owner makes fortune

And, finally, a GB News’s co-owner, who also owns the hedge fund Marshall Wace, made millions for the fund by betting against NatWest, The Telegraph reported on Wednesday:

GB News owner Sir Paul Marshall’s hedge fund has made a multi-million pound gain on its bet against NatWest shares following the exit of Dame Alison Rose.

Regulatory filings show that Marshall Wace has the biggest short position in the lender’s shares meaning it stands to gain from falls in the bank’s market price.

The fund netted paper gains of around £5m on Wednesday after NatWest’s share price slumped more than 3.7pc after the departure of its chief executive Dame Alison Rose, which wiped more than £850m off the value of the lender.

While the gain represents a tiny sum relative to Marshall Wace’s more than $60bn in assets under management, it may give Sir Paul extra satisfaction given his stance against “woke” business culture …

Sir Paul, whose son Winston was a member of the band Mumford and Sons, has been a prominent backer of Brexit, calling it “a huge opportunity for the UK”.

Ahh, that explains why Winston is a regular GB News guest.

This bet was computer-driven and placed before the Farage farrago:

The hedge fund has software it calls TOPS (Trade Optimised Portfolio System), which analyses the views of analysts and economists and gives indications where to invest.

Marshall Wace first disclosed that it was building a short position against NatWest in March, when fears were growing over the health of the global financial system following the collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse.

At the start of last month it had borrowed 0.8pc of the shares to profit from price falls, but has since trimmed the bet to 0.59pc, according to data from the Financial Conduct Authority.

Last year, alongside Legatum, a Dubai-based group founded by the billionaire Christopher Chandler, he bought out the US entertainment giant Warner Bros. Discovery and GB News co-founders Andrew Cole and Mark Schneider of their stake in the news network.

Last year, Sir Paul shared a pot of more than £720m with a group of 23 partners after his London-based hedge fund posted a surge in profits.

Marshall Wace declined to comment.

Another update will come in due course.

Victory for Nigel Farage as NatWest chief Dame Alison Rose resigns

July 26, 2023 in history | Tags: 2023, Andrew Griffith, BBC, Boris Johnson, commercial banking, Conservative Party, Craig Mackinlay, Daily Telegraph, Dame Alison Rose, Dan Wootton, GB News, Guido Fawkes, history, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Michelle Dewberry, Nana Akua, Nigel Farage, Peter Flavel, Rishi Sunak, Sir Howard Davies, video | 5 comments

What a happy day Wednesday, July 26 turned out to be.

The head of NatWest Group, Dame Alison Rose, resigned in the early hours of the morning:

Somewhere in The Telegraph it said (H/T to a Guido Fawkes reader, purple emphases mine):

Victoria Scholar, head of investment at Interactive Investor, said:

As the first woman to take the top job at one of the big four UK banks back in 2019, this is a sad moment for female representation …

It certainly is. Women are no purer than men when they’re in a position of responsibility or prominence. For anyone doubting that, think Hillary Clinton.

I will go into Dame Alison’s resignation in more depth, but what follows are discussions and reports leading to her exit.

Boris Johnson gives his view

On Friday, July 21, The Times reported that NatWest was likely to face a deluge of subject access requests from angry ex-customers:

NatWest is set to be deluged with demands from “debanked” customers attempting to discover why they lost their accounts.

A Facebook group of 10,000 people, claiming to have had their NatWest accounts shut, has been filled with customers sharing templates and instructions on how to get hold of data held about them.

It comes after Nigel Farage used the “subject access request” (SAR) — a data protection right — to obtain a 40-page dossier outlining the reasons behind Coutts’s decision to drop him. It led to an apology from NatWest Group’s chief executive yesterday …

Writing on the Facebook group called “NatWest closed down my account” one former customer said: “I have just submitted a subject access request on NatWest, here is a link. I encourage everyone on this group to do so, let’s keep them busy.”

Another shared a template of a request sent directly to Dame Alison Rose, NatWest’s chief executive. He said: “I strongly believe that we all have the right to know why our accounts were closed. If you’re in the same situation, I encourage you to send a similar request to NatWest …”

NatWest said: “We would always encourage customers who have any queries about their accounts to contact us directly in the first instance.

“Customers who wish to obtain a SAR have a right to access and receive a copy of their customer data, and can do so by visiting natwest.com.”

The following graphic came from another source, but these sections of the GDPR (data protection law) may be relevant:

That evening, The Times posted another article, ‘Nigel Farage: Boris Johnson points finger at NatWest boss Alison Rose’:

Boris Johnson has called for the banking chief at the heart of the Nigel Farage fiasco to lose her job if she leaked confidential information, as MPs challenged her lucrative bonus.

The former prime minister said he would “wager the entire contents of my own personal bank account” that Dame Alison Rose, chief executive of NatWest Group, had discussed Farage’s account at Coutts, a subsidiary, with Simon Jack, the BBC’s business editor.

The journalist and the banking executive sat next to each other at a BBC correspondents’ charity dinner at the five-star Langham Hotel across from Broadcasting House on July 3.

It was one day before Jack published a story suggesting Farage had not met the wealth threshold for Coutts – a claim later proven to be false.

Johnson, writing in The Daily Mail, said: “I would bet my house that it was no coincidence that the following day Simon Jack ran a BBC story claiming that the decision by Coutts to whack Farage was nothing to do with politics.

“Is there anyone who seriously thinks that Alison Rose was not involved — especially since neither party is now willing to comment?”

Johnson called for Andrew Griffith, the City minister, to establish the facts about “how a false impression of Farage’s financial circumstances was given to the media”.

He added: “I am afraid that if Dame Alison was in any way responsible then she really needs to go” …

Johnson said he “vehemently” supported Farage over the row. He added: “This is about far more than the bank account of one person. It is about freedom under the law, for everyone in this country.

“It is about the freedom to think and say what you believe — provided you don’t break the law — without the fear of open or covert persecution.

“That freedom made our country great. It is under threat. It is time to fight.”

Meanwhile, Rose had been seen at various public events just before the Farage farrago broke. Fellow guests were bemused:

Yesterday, it emerged that Rose had raised eyebrows at the sustainability event for the space industry just 24 hours before the Farage scandal broke.

She mingled with guests including astronauts Tim Peake and Chris Hadfield at the Buckingham Palace event on June 28.

It was hosted by the King as part of his Sustainable Markets Initiative, of which NatWest is a member, which aims to accelerate the world’s transition to a sustainable future.

The event was to encourage the global private sector to align space exploration with sustainability.

One source claimed that “no one knew” why Rose was there and that other guests were “bemused” by her presence.

It was her second climate change event of the day, June 28, after she attended the Bloomberg Sustainable Business Summit in the morning.

During an interview at the summit, she said the “climate emergency” was the “biggest challenge we are going to face”.

The article reminded us of her enormous salary and sizeable bonus — as well as the banking group’s priorities, which are not in maximising profits. It is worth remembering that since the banking debacle of 2008, part of NatWest Group has been owned by the taxpayers. Currently, we own 39% of NatWest:

In February, she took home a bonus of £643,000 — split half in cash and half in shares. Last year, she earned £5.2million. She was the first NatWest Group chief executive since the 2008 taxpayer bailout to get an annual cash bonus.

Craig Mackinlay, a Tory MP, said: “Going along to various fringe events in the net zero and sustainability field does not sound to me like attempts to maximise profits for shareholders.

“She is being paid a very, very generous salary and it is obvious that the bank is off on a strange path under her watch. There should be question marks over her future bonuses” …

A source close to the bank defended supporting climate change, describing it as a “growth lever”.

In addition to Net Zero, there is another aspect to the bank’s policies:

James Clarry placed his role as the Coutts & Co diversity champion front and centre of his professional responsibilities at the bank (Tom Witherow writes).

The former chief operating officer, 50, wrote on his LinkedIn profile that he “founded allyship programmes” and “won multiple awards in recognition of inclusive leadership” — above other attributes such as “delivering growth” and “generating revenue”.

The executive, who lives with his wife Annie, told followers online he had been hailed as “Champion Ally” at the 2021 Ethnicity Awards. His name came to the fore after Coutts told a client of almost 30 years that accounts of clients under suspicion of racial or discriminatory conduct would be referred to the senior leadership team, including Clarry, for a “final decision”.

Clarry, a former head boy at a grammar school in Buckinghamshire, studied law at the University of Nottingham in the 1990s, beginning his career at Allen & Overy, a “magic circle” law firm (one of the five most prestigious London-headquartered multinational law firms). His first job at the Royal Bank of Scotland was as a solicitor in its global banking and markets division. He rose through the ranks before transferring to Coutts — which was owned by the RBS Group — in 2011 where, as its general counsel, he was treated to regular travel to Jersey, Switzerland and Asia. As the chief operating officer, he was the chairman of the wealth businesses risk committee, a member of the reputational risk committee and a regular among those attending the Coutts risk and audit committee. He listed “awareness raising” among his “skills” online.

One wonders whether he was still in charge of the wealth business risk committee and a member of the reputational risk committee when Coutts made the decision to close Farage’s accounts.

Clarry has since moved on from Coutts to charity:

Last month he left to take up a job at social justice charity Justice and Care, which tackles modern slavery. On leaving, he wrote: “I have many incredible memories, but I am particularly proud of our work on gender and ethnic equity.”

The Sun reacts

On Sunday, The Sun‘s veteran columnist Trevor Kavanagh wrote:

NIGEL FARAGE has not just blown the bloody doors off Coutts bank and its Stasi-style spying.

He has exposed a conspiracy to shift this country permanently to the left — through Whitehall, the police, town halls, the BBC and the boardrooms of Britain.

Coutts’ dossier of lies, cover-ups and officially sanctioned surveillance provide a devastating glimpse of the Brussels-loving, Brexit-hating, woke-worshipping Blob at work.

Coutts, favoured by the very rich, from Mafia crooks to the King of England, has been caught with its pants down, in flagrante.

It is not just Farage who has been singled out for expulsion from woke society.

Tens of thousands more have found their banking lifeline cut off for no reason.

Kavanagh blamed a British organisation called Common Purpose:

… they may actually be victims of another shadowy organisation, known as The Octopus, set up in the Blair era, whose tentacles reach into every nook and cranny of our daily lives.

Its real name is Common Purpose.

You have almost certainly never heard of it.

But it has grown in two decades from a small group of influencers under middle-class networker Julia Middleton into a global multimillion pound charity with leverage in the highest places.

In 1988, she spelled out how to do it.

“A small, committed and co-ordinated group of people producing pressure from the outside,” she said.

“Two or three determined fifth columnists on the inside. And the stamina from both groups to keep on and on and on putting them on the agenda until they eventually had to be discussed.”

Even she might be surprised how successful these plans would prove.

Kavanagh cited examples of the organisation at work over the years in many areas of public life:

CP’s luminaries include ex-Met boss Cressida Dick, ex-EU Commissioner Chris Patten, council bosses and top civil service mandarins who pay £5,000-plus for lessons on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, the issue at the heart of the Coutts row with Farage.

Its clients may also include Coutts itself, just as its relation, the Royal Bank of Scotland, was before being bailed out by the Goverment in 2008.

The Sun last week asked Coutts if any senior figures — including chief executive Dame Alison Rose — have attended such courses.

So far, no response.

The same question could be put to Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, which also designated EDI [Equity, Diversity and Inclusion] as its primary goal — apparently ahead of cutting inflation.

The BBC is certainly a supporter.

During his time at the Beeb, ITV’s political editor Robert Peston recalls a CP course which ended “with a collective wail about the irresponsibility and excessive power of the media”.

Talking of irresponsible media, Alison Rose is the alleged source of inaccurate claims (aka “lies”) peddled by the BBC’s Simon Jack that Farage did not have enough cash to justify his Coutts account.

Both Rose and Jack now risk losing their jobs.

Common Purpose ranges far wider than Brexit-bashing, Gay Pride, trans issues and Net Zero.

It is closely linked with anti-press hypocrites Hacked Off, who want newspapers regulated by the state.

Political censorship is also backed by another totalitarian group, which pressures advertisers to withdraw business from media whose views they disagree with.

They’re the modern equivalent of book burners.

They bully advertising agencies into denying publicity for organisations deemed to be on the wrong side of the culture wars — such as The Sun, Daily Mail, Daily Express and GB News.

Kavanagh pointed out that Labour had no comment on the Farage farrago or woke banking:

Interestingly, Sir Keir Starmer’s press-bashing Labour Party has had absolutely nothing to say about this scandal.

As for woke banking, it has been going on in the US for some time as well. In that sense, I’m not sure that Common Purpose is all to blame. I’m pretty sure this originated in the US.

In my post on Friday, I cited The Telegraph‘s Alison Pearson, who discussed Environmental, Social and Governance — ESG — policies and scores:

So alarming is the tentacular stranglehold this philosophy has over financial institutions that, back in the spring, Governor Ron DeSantis took steps to ban ESG in Florida. He called it “woke banking”. “What it’s evolved into is a mechanism to inject political ideology into investment decisions, corporate governance, and really just the everyday economy,” said DeSantis. ESG policies were enforced by “elites” in financial institutions to push “woke” political agendas which did not not prioritise financial interests.

The BBC apologises to Farage

My last post on Farage’s bank account was dated Friday, July 21. At that point, Conservative MPs were aghast that the head of one of the UK’s largest banking groups would discuss a former customer’s account with a BBC reporter, especially over dinner. While Dame Alison had apologised, the BBC had not.

On Monday morning, July 24, The Express reported that a former BBC newsreader urged the corporation to apologise to Farage for its error in reporting the story:

A former BBC newsreader has called on one of the corporation’s journalists to apologise to Nigel Farage over a story about his bank account being shut.

Nicholas Owen made the comment about a report by the BBC‘s business editor Simon Jack that the ex-Ukip and Brexit Party leader had been cut off by Coutts because he did not meet the wealth threshold.

But it has since emerged that Mr Farage’s account was closed because his views did not “align” with the prestigious private bank, which is owned by NatWest.

The BBC journalist sat next to NatWest chief executive Dame Alison Rose the night before the article was published earlier this month.

Mr Owen told GB News: “Simon Jack is a jolly good journalist, jolly good at his job, and he sits next to a banker who gives him a line on the Nigel Farage story, well, of course, he’s going to go with that, it’s a jolly good source.

“But if that source turns out to be wrong, the facts are simply the other way round as Nigel himself has now discovered in great detail, then for goodness’ sake, just put your hands up. Simon, come on lad, just say ‘Sorry, got that wrong’.”

Mr Farage has written to the head of the Beeb demanding a formal apology over its reporting on the closure of his Coutts bank account.

In his letter to director-general Tim Davie, he said he had faced “humiliating” publicity due to the corporation’s article.

It cited a source as saying the move to close his account was a “commercial” decision rather than political reasons as he was claiming.

The BBC has since published an update to the original story by business editor Simon Jack, admitting it “turned out not to be accurate”.

Yet, an apology had not been forthcoming. The ‘turned out not to be accurate’ statement appeared on a previous evening news bulletin and on the corporation’s webpage, without a personal admission to Farage himself.

It was only late on Monday afternoon that reporter Simon Jack finally apologised to Farage:

@Nigel_Farage The information on which we based our reporting on Nigel Farage and his bank accounts came from a trusted and senior source. However the information turned out to be incomplete and inaccurate. Therefore I would like to apologise to Mr Farage.

— Simon Jack (@BBCSimonJack) July 24, 2023

Guido Fawkes noted (red emphases his):

Took him long enough. Nige’s legal threats probably woke him up a bit…

Farage tweeted his thanks for Jack’s apology and said that the BBC News CEO Deborah Turness also apologised to him:

Farage covered the corporation’s apologies on his GB News show that evening, acknowledging them as ‘fulsome’ and ‘very, very rare’. He then turned his attention to Coutts’s head, Peter Flavel, from whom he has heard nothing, and said he wants to get ‘the absolute truth’ on what happened. Farage said he has now put in a subject access request to NatWest, his previous one had been to Coutts, which produced the shocking 40-page report, which I covered on July 20. Farage ended by thanking Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Andrew Griffith MP for their support:

On Tuesday, a BBC report told us:

Mr Farage said he accepted the apologies “with good grace”, but said questions for Coutts remained.

He thanked BBC News CEO Deborah Turness – who has written to him – and business editor Simon Jack – who has tweeted – for their apologies.

“It’s not often that the BBC apologise. But for the BBC to apologise, I’m very, very pleased,” Mr Farage said.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme, Mr Farage said he had had to publish a lot of material in order to clear up misinformation in the wake of the 4 July story.

“I had to go to very great lengths and great personal damage to undo the story,” Mr Farage said.

“There is no fault or no blame on the BBC. This now goes right back to the Natwest Banking Group [owners of Coutts].

“Someone in that group decided it was appropriate, legal and ethical to leak details of my personal financial situation.

“That, I think, is wrong on every level – and that is where the spotlight should be and it will.”

Mr Jack, who tweeted his apology, said his story had been “from a trusted and senior source”.

“However, the information turned out to be incomplete and inaccurate. Therefore, I would like to apologise to Mr Farage,” Mr Jack continued.

Mr Farage later said: “Jack says, in the tweet, that his information came from a trusted and senior source. I would suggest that it may well have been a very senior source.”

On 21 July, the BBC updated its original article to say it had “not been accurate”. Mr Farage then asked for a formal apology from the BBC.

On Monday, the BBC said on its Corrections and Clarifications website: “We acknowledge that the information we reported – that Coutts’ decision on Mr Farage’s account did not involve considerations about his political views – turned out not to be accurate and have apologised to Mr Farage.”

The de-banked Anglican priest

On Tuesday evening, The Telegraph published the Revd Richard Fothergill’s story about his cancellation by Yorkshire Building Society, ‘Not even Reverends like me are safe from the banks’ woke purge’. I covered his story on July 6.

He says that, as a Yorkshireman, the building society had always been a part of his life. His father had an account there for a quarter of a century, and he had an account there for 17 years, then:

Like millions of savings account holders, I received an email from them nearly every month saying “How are we doing? We want to hear from you!”. In May one such message came through promoting the upcoming LGBTQIA+ Pride month in June, so I used this as an opportunity to offer feedback.

I wrote back two paragraphs expressing two views. One: was promoting Pride really such a good use of their time? Were there not implications for their brand?

Second: as a Minister in the Church, I expressed a strong ethical concern about the ‘T’ element of LGBT, particularly given how transgender ideology impacts children.

I thought nothing of it, and was pretty sure their Customer Relations department would just ignore me. At best, I assumed, if another 100 YBS customers pushed back, perhaps next year they would dial it down? I was obviously polite in my message to them, and lawyers who have seen both our pieces of correspondence confirm this.

I heard nothing from them for two weeks. Then a rather sharp letter suddenly arrived. It declared: “Your comments will not stand” and “we must protect our workforce from prejudice”. Then, rather cryptically – given this was the first I had heard about it – it added: “The relationship between us has irrevocably broken down.”

Remember, I wasn’t criticising them for how they manage money or any particular individual; I was merely challenging their straying into contentious social issues pushing on us customers a particular worldview. They asked for feedback and I gave them some – it’s just that my comments were the wrong sort.

Afterwards, he got in touch with Toby Young’s Free Speech Union:

Initially I was going to ignore all this. But as I prayed, I came to feel the right thing to do was to stand up against this intolerance and bullying. I talked to my friends at the Free Speech Union and they put me in touch with an excellent journalist who wrote up my story accurately, and off we went. It has struck a chord with the public …

As a Church leader, I want to flag up the insidiousness of this cause which none of us had ever heard about five years ago. I believe we should all stand up against this woke worldview and be confident we are in the right, not being ‘discriminatory’, ‘intolerant’, or ‘bigoted’ for doing so. Far from it, we are protecting future generations from a creed which I and many others firmly believe puts minors on a pathway to gender altering surgery, sterility and much mental trauma.

I have great hope that Britons will not allow this to happen and that woke thinking will be removed wholly from our culture. In my view, a just, fair, tolerant culture is one based on the revelations of God through Jesus Christ. It says in the Bible, ‘it is for freedom’s sake that Christ has set you free’ and that applies to all aspects of life – freedom from bullying, freedom from fear, freedom to think for yourself, freedom to choose, freedom to worship and associate with whom you like.

Let’s not let a narrow group of woke extremists take that away. Let’s return to our foundations as a nation – one that knows and trusts in God.

I fully agree, but our nation is no longer ‘one that knows and trusts in God’, hence the problem!

Tuesday’s spotlight on Coutts and NatWest

Articles and commentary continued to emerge about Coutts and parent company NatWest on Tuesday, July 25.

In the late afternoon, The Telegraph published ‘Nigel Farage accuses Coutts boss of being “asleep at the wheel”‘, which concerns its chief, Peter Flavel:

Nigel Farage has accused the boss of Coutts of being “asleep at the wheel” throughout the scandal over its decision to “de-bank” him because of his political views.

Mr Farage, the former Brexit Party leader, said he had written to Peter Flavel three times but has yet to receive a reply, calling his handling of the situation “an absolute disgrace” …

Mr Farage was placed on a “glide path to exit” by the institution in March, and it is now set to pull down the shutters on his account within weeks.

The politician, who says he has been refused accounts at 10 other banks, has told Mr Flavel that he plans to turn up at a branch and withdraw his money in cash on the final day.

In an email sent to the Coutts CEO on April 19, he wrote: “I retired from active politics in January 2020, so doubt I can still be a politically exposed person.

“My recent business activity has been quite normal. Whilst I have no desire for this event to be in the public arena, I can’t help wonder that there may be some prejudice here.

“If other banks decided that I am too high profile, then both of us would be in a very interesting public position. What on earth is going on?”

The first paragraph of that email, dated April 19 — which is in the article — reads:

I have banked with Coutts for some years, both business and personal, and prior to that with Natwest since 1980. My personal manager, Mark Pierce, with whom I organised a mortgage repayment etc. left some months ago. A new man, Min Fung, replaced him, to whom I have never spoken before despite expressing to one of his juniors that I should. Out of the blue I receive a phone call to say the accounts will be closed, followed by a letter. No explanation is offered.

The bank’s head of client coverage, Camilla Stowell, got in touch with Farage. This means that Flavel had seen Farage’s email and passed it on.

On May 1, Farage wrote Flavel saying, in part:

As explained to her I have been rejected by several banks. On current course I will be at your branch on…the final date, wiht [sic] a security van to collect approx [the account’s balance] in cash.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Came there no reply.

On Monday, July 24, Farage wrote Flavel again, mentioning the BBC’s coverage and the subject access request (SAR) from Coutts. His message ended:

Not only was that briefing inaccurate and wrong but it was in clear breach of my confidential information. Despite all of this I still have heard nothing from you. Are you asleep at the wheel? Do you simply not care?

The article concludes:

Mr Flavel joined the high-end bank, owned by the NatWest group, in 2016. Before that, he worked for JP Morgan and Standard Chartered in Asia.

Mr Farage said he should be under pressure alongside Dame Alison Rose, the NatWest Group boss, who is fighting for her job amid speculation that she briefed the BBC.

He said of Mr Flavel: “It’s his people that wrote this document. It’s a pretty appalling report. I think it’s an absolute disgrace. I think his position is even more vulnerable than hers. This guy is directly responsible and has done and said nothing – it’s not good enough.”

Coutts has been contacted for comment.

That afternoon, reports had been coming in saying that Dame Alison had admitted she was the BBC’s source for the Farage story and that she had the banking group’s directors’ full support. This Twitter thread is from The Sun‘s political editor Harry Cole, a Guido alum:

A Telegraph article provoked an immediate angry response of 2,000 tweets within 50 minutes:

GB News shows featured updates as well as damning indictments from its presenters and panellists.

Nana Akua, substituting for Patrick Christys mid-afternoon, said that, whether or not the identity of the leaker emerged soon, Farage would pursue it to the end, then asked if Rose was responsible:

Michelle Dewberry said that she herself is a NatWest customer and disagrees with the directors saying that it is in the interest of ‘all’ customers and shareholders that Rose remain in place, when she had broken confidentiality laws. She questioned whether any of the people at the top of NatWest Group were ‘fit for purpose’:

Farage’s show followed. His editorial opened with the statement by NatWest’s chair, Howard Davies, that the bank’s board of directors had concluded Rose should remain as the CEO, ‘as demonstrated by our results’ over the past four years. He added that a review of account closure arrangements at Coutts would take place, the findings of which would be made public once complete. He said that the terms of reference and lead firm conducting the review ‘will be announced shortly’. Farage said:

‘NatWest CEO Dame Alison Rose, NatWest Group chairman Howard Davies and Coutts CEO Peter Flavel have all failed. Frankly, they should all go.’

Nigel Farage says NatWest are ‘doing their best to prop up Alison Rose’ after they refused to sack her over her BBC leak debacle.

His show had four more segments on his banking situation which followed: Conservative MP David Davis was on next, then a member of the Chartered Banker Institute, a business consultant discussing many SMEs who find it hard to get a business account and, finally, The Sun‘s former editor Kelvin Mackenzie, who minced no words. Mackenzie is, incidentally, a Coutts customer himself:

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s show followed. Rees-Mogg has been a Coutts customer since the age of 13. He discussed Rose’s position with former Channel 4 correspondent Michael Crick and former Conservative MP Jerry Hayes, who still works as a barrister. All lamented the deplorable situation of Farage’s account closure and agreed that, under the circumstances, Rose would have to go, either on Wednesday, when City Minister Andrew Griffith was holding a special banking meeting that day or, at the latest, on Friday. They agreed that Wednesday would probably be the day, because it was unlikely Rose would show up at Andrew Griffith’s meeting:

Dan Wootton’s programme followed. He opened with an editorial saying that politically-oriented bank closures must stop, otherwise we will find ourselves in a Chinese-style social credit score system:

As GB News’s broadcasts continued, The Telegraph had more news about Rose and her future.

The paper published ‘Dame Alison Rose’s statement in full: “I made a serious error of judgment”‘, the highlights of which follow:

I recognise that in my conversations with Simon Jack of the BBC, I made a serious error of judgment in discussing Mr Farage’s relationship with the bank. Given the consequences of this, I want to address the questions that have been raised and set out the substance of the conversations that took place.

Believing it was public knowledge, I confirmed that Mr Farage was a Coutts customer and that he had been offered a NatWest bank account.

How would the public know that Farage banked with Coutts? He only said so after the BBC did!

Even if we all knew that fact, which we didn’t, she just should have said she doesn’t discuss business, because it’s confidential. I worked briefly for a retail bank, and that was rule number one!

A former Coutts employee told Farage the same thing, saying that a cashier — teller, in American parlance — would be sacked for breaching client confidentiality:

She also said:

… I recognise that I left Mr Jack with the impression that the decision to close Mr Farage’s accounts was solely a commercial one.

I was not part of the decision-making process to exit Mr Farage. This decision was made by Coutts, and I was informed in April that this was for commercial reasons. At the time of my conversations with Mr Jack, I was not in receipt of the contents of the Coutts Wealth Reputational Risk Committee materials subsequently released by Mr Farage. I have apologised to Mr Farage for the deeply inappropriate language contained in those papers and the Board has commissioned a full independent review into the decision and process to ensure that this cannot happen again.

Put simply, I was wrong to respond to any question raised by the BBC about this case. I want to extend my sincere apologies to Mr Farage for the personal hurt this has caused him and I have written to him today.

I would like to say sorry to the Board and my colleagues. I started my career working for National Westminster Bank. It is an institution I care about enormously and have always been proud to be a part of. It has been the privilege of my career to lead the bank and I am grateful to the Board for entrusting me with this role. It is therefore all the more regrettable that my actions have compounded an already difficult issue for the Group.

The article also has the full statement from Sir Howard Davie, her boss, which Farage discussed in his aforementioned editorial.

A short time later, while Farage’s show was airing, the Telegraph View — the main editorial — stated ‘Alison Rose’s position is clearly untenable’:

… She had made a “serious error of judgment in discussing Mr Farage’s relationship with the bank”, she admitted, but had not revealed any personal financial information about him. She put the problem down to her leaving Mr Jack “with the impression that the decision to close Mr Farage’s accounts was solely a commercial one”.

Does she really think that is good enough? If her explanation was apparently so innocent, why did she not admit to the conversation last week, the first time she apologised to Mr Farage?

While the chairman of NatWest, Sir Howard Davies, last night expressed the board’s confidence in its chief executive, many investors and customers will consider Dame Alison’s behaviour to have brought the bank into disrepute. Not only was Mr Farage’s Coutts account closed because of his political views – a fact that NatWest only belatedly seemed to acknowledge – but its chief executive has allowed herself to be dragged into the row. Would Dame Alison accept such behaviour from her more junior employees? At best, her leadership of the bank looks stunningly inept.

Indeed, her position is clearly untenable. Banking might have been transformed by the digital age, but the relationship between customer and institution still depends, ultimately, on trust. She has surely sacrificed the trust of swathes of the public horrified by the treatment of Mr Farage.

The British state retains a substantial stake in NatWest, part of the legacy of its bailout during the financial crisis. If Dame Alison cannot see that her continuing as chief executive has become a distraction for a business that still has not fully recovered from its near-collapse in 2008, the Government should force the board’s hand and replace her.

By the time Dan Wootton was into the first half-hour of his show, Conservative MPs were weighing in on the situation. The Telegraph posted ‘NatWest boss’s Farage leak admission prompts “significant concern from No. 10″‘:

… Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt are understood to have “significant concerns” about Dame Alison staying in her post. There is expectation within the Government that she will have to quit …

Dame Alison is a member of the Prime Minister’s Business Council, and is set to attend a meeting of bank leaders with Andrew Griffith, the economic secretary to the Treasury, in Downing Street on Wednesday.

In further pressure on the NatWest boss, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the banking watchdog, revealed that it had raised concerns about breaches of confidentiality by Coutts and its parent company NatWest and said it had “made clear” to the bigger bank the need for an independent review.

On Tuesday night, senior Conservative MPs demanded that Dame Alison resign or be fired from her job at a bank that is 39 per cent owned by the taxpayer.

Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former business secretary, said: “She has to go. She has admitted it and she has to go. She has broken one of the fundamental codes of banking and therefore she must go.”

A City chief executive said: “She has broken the cardinal rule of banking. An FCA investigation is inevitable now. Her position is untenable and she should resign. It’s ridiculous the board is backing her given the seriousness of the offence.”

That evening, The Times had an article about concerned MPs, ‘De-banking furore grows as MPs start investigation’:

MPs have expressed concerns that high street lenders are “freezing, withdrawing or withholding bank accounts” from businesses with “little or no explanation”.

The all-party parliamentary group on fair business banking is examining “how and why banking facilities are being denied” …

The issue of businesses being de-banked is thought to be a widespread problem and is often linked with lenders’ perception of the risk profiles of companies or their directors. A desire not to fall foul of anti-money laundering rules is often said to lie behind banks’ closure of business accounts.

Lenders also say they are often forbidden from explaining why they are closing accounts because of rules about “tipping off” potential offenders.

UK Finance, the banking trade body, said lenders “understand the impact of account closures on businesses, and any decision is only taken after extensive review and analysis. Banks will consider a number of factors including compliance with applicable laws and regulations, as well as a firm’s own risk management.”

Andrew Griffith, economic secretary to the Treasury, has written to lenders to say the government is proposing that banks provide 90 days’ notice of account termination in most cases and that they improve transparency so that customers have a “clear understanding” of the reason for closure, unless providing one would be unlawful.

As Wednesday’s papers were being delivered to London’s newsstands, The Times posted ‘Downing St puts NatWest boss Alison Rose under pressure to resign’:

The Times has been told that Downing Street and Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, have significant concerns about Rose remaining in post. Three other cabinet ministers said that Rose’s position was untenable.

Downing Street’s concerns are particularly significant as taxpayers have a 39 per cent stake in NatWest, which owns Coutts.

One cabinet minister said: “She has got to go. She has no integrity and has done material damage to the bank and its reputation. The chairman has also lost his credibility by saying it’s in the interests of customers and shareholders to keep her. Frankly the whole board has got to go if it wants to defend her.”

A second said that her apology was “not enough” and that it is “difficult to see how she can survive”, while a third said that “she’s got to go”.

“She hasn’t understood from the outset just how serious this is,” they said. “She’s obfuscated at every turn.”

Farage last night called for both Rose and Davies to quit. He said: “Dame Alison Rose has now admitted that she is the source. She broke client confidentiality, and is unfit to be CEO of NatWest Group.”

Two front pages featured Rose and NatWest. Note how much smaller the Financial Times headline is than The Telegraph‘s. This shows you everything you need to know about the FT — a Remainer newspaper:

Wednesday morning’s news

And now we come back to where this post started, with the FT‘s tweet that Rose had resigned.

The Telegraph featured live coverage and the effect her resignation had on UK markets.

At 6:49:

Good morning

Thanks for being with us. The City minister will meet bank bosses today to discuss concerns about closing customer accounts over their political views.

The gathering comes as the banking sector reels from the resignation of NatWest chief executive Dame Alison Rose following weeks of controversy over the decision by Coutts to “de-bank” Nigel Farage.

At 7:13:

Mr Farage has called for a “cultural change” at the bank and within the wider industry, as he promised to continue to campaign on account closures.

He told the PA news agency he wanted a “cultural change within NatWest, they ought to go back to being a bank, rather than being a moral arbiter for political positions”.

He added: “But I think this culture runs deep through the entire banking industry. I think there is a massive anti-Brexit prejudice and I think the whole thing needs to change.”

At 7:19:

… Andrew Griffith, the City minister, has said it was “right” for NatWest boss Dame Alison Rose to step down, writes our politics live editor Jack Maidment …

It is right that the NatWest CEO has resigned.

This would never have happened if NatWest had not taken it upon itself to withdraw a bank account due to someone’s lawful political views. That was and is always unacceptable.

I hope the whole financial sector learns from this… https://t.co/W4i3WYgeyX

— Andrew Griffith MP (@griffitha) July 26, 2023

At 7:25:

… Mr Farage said that he believes Dame Alison Rose had effectively tried to “lie her way out” after it emerged Coutts had “debanked” the former Ukip leader over his political views, rather than commercial reasons.

He told GB News:

When (Dame Alison) was caught having breached confidentiality, she tried – supported by her board – to frankly lie her way out.

I thought the statement that came out at 6pm last night … was rather reminiscent of the Premier League football club that’s in crisis that says ‘we have every confidence in our manager’.

I didn’t think she could last beyond the end of the week. We have, on Friday, the half-yearly figures coming. There is an investor meeting at 9.30 that morning.

So, she’s gone, and that’s a start, but I have to say that (Coutts chief executive) Peter Flavel … (NatWest chair) Howard Davies … it was the board that sanctioned this culture that talks about diversity and inclusion, and actually is very divisive.

In my case, as you can clearly see, pretty poisonous stuff. I think any board member that endorsed that statement last night, where they said ‘yes, she breached confidentiality, but she can stay in her post’… frankly, I think the whole board needs to go.

Guido has the video clip:

Guido’s post says, in part:

So far the Labour front bench have kept quiet, although Starmer is on Radio 5 Live at 10a.m. You can’t barrage the Farage…

UPDATE: Rose has also been told to step down from Downing Street’s Business Council and Energy Efficiency Taskforce. Finished…

Returning to The Telegraph, a 7:33 entry says that Farage also spoke with Sky News.

At 7:42:

Bank chiefs will be quizzed by the City minister today to discuss concerns about closing customer accounts over their political views.

The summit with Andrew Griffith will hold extra weight after NatWest chief executive Dame Alison Rose quit overnight after admitting that she leaked private banking information about Nigel Farage to the BBC …

Mr Griffiths meeting with bank bosses comes ahead of proposed government reforms requiring banks to explain and delay these decisions.

At 7:44, the entry said that Farage told Sky News he still did not have a replacement bank account. (He has approached ten banks [see 7:53], all of which said no. Presumably, the offer of a personal account at NatWest still stands?)

At 7:49:

A No10 source said Rishi Sunak “was concerned about the unfolding situation” and “Alison Rose has done the right thing in resigning”, writes Jack Maidment.

The source said: “Everyone would expect people in public life – whether that’s in a business leadership role or otherwise – to act responsibly and with integrity.”

At 8:03:

Shares in NatWest dropped by 4pc as markets opened in London, following the resignation of chief executive Dame Alison Rose.

It helped drag down the FTSE 100 by 0.2pc to 7,667.34, while the midcap FTSE 250 was flat at 19,155.06.

At 8:14:

Policing Minister Chris Philp said a lot of MPs or their families have been turned down by banking services because of “politically exposed persons, or pep, rules”.

Mr Philp told Sky News:

(The rules) were designed to stop essentially members of foreign governments who had obtained their money dishonestly from using the UK banking system to essentially launder it.

So, the rules are set up for the right reasons but MPs quite often get caught by these pep rules because they’re applied kind of overzealously.

It is not spoken about much but if you look at almost any MP they will have had an experience like this, I think the Nigel Farage case is an extreme one, but I’m afraid it’s not unique.

When asked if he has had difficulty accessing financial services, Mr Philp said: “My family have actually, I don’t want to go into detail.”

I’ll leave it there for now, but anyone who thinks Farage will be re-entering politics will be disappointed. Guaranteed bank accounts, within legal reason, are his new cause:

You can hear a clip of that interview here. Robinson treated Farage appallingly, then said he was ‘only teasing’. Typical BBC. How I wish we were no longer obliged to pay the licence fee: a mandatory tax.

We are fortunate to have Nigel Farage as the people’s champion. First, Brexit and, now, bank accounts. Thank you, Nigel!

Bank chief apologises to Farage — but no reinstatement of account

July 21, 2023 in history | Tags: 2023, Alison Pearson, Andrew Griffith, BBC, Boris Johnson, commercial banking, Daily Telegraph, Dame Alison Rose, Eric Trump, ESG, GB News, Guido Fawkes, history, Jacob Rees-Mogg, legislation, Michael Fabricant, Nigel Farage, Nigel Lawson, Simon Heffer, subject access request, Thomas Coutts | 3 comments

Yesterday’s post provided an update on Nigel Farage’s bank account closure, the 40-page report on him from Coutts and the attention it attracted in Parliament during Rishi Sunak’s PMQs.

Something unusual happened later in the day: an apology to Farage from Dame Alison Rose, the head of NatWest Group, parent company of Coutts.

Perhaps Rishi Sunak’s tweet prompted her to act:

This is a potted recap of what the Coutts report said about Farage:

Or perhaps it was because of an allegation that the banking watchdog found the circumstances of the BBC story about Farage’s bank account ‘concerning’:

Hmm.

Thanks to others who posted various screen grabs online, including the letter of apology:

However, note that there is no apology for the fact that someone breached Farage’s privacy to bring about the BBC story and no offer of reinstating Farage’s Coutts accounts.

On the subject of privacy, here is the Coutts policy:

It pledges a commitment to ‘protecting any information we collect about you’. Therefore, the BBC story never should have seen the light of day.

However, Coutts is interested in its customers’ use of social media and ‘information’ it receives about that use, ‘anonymous or otherwise’, including ‘the frequency of your visits and the comments you make’, because it ‘helps us better understand and serve our customers’.

That’s an interesting way of putting it.

Guido Fawkes has posted the report from the Group Reputational Risk Committee in its entirety.

Guido says (red emphases his):

Coutts has faced an almighty PR headache since it was revealed they de-banked Nigel Farage for political reasons, and co-conspirators can now read those reasons for themselves. Coutts made the decision based on Farage’s “publicly-stated views that were at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation.” This is the same “inclusive” organisation that excludes anybody with a bank balance below £1,000,000. The bank then claims somewhat incoherently “this was not a political decision but one centred around inclusivity and Purpose.”

Digging deeper into the dossier, and the full extent of Farage’s (completely legal) crimes become apparent. The bank claims Farage is seen as “xenophobic and racist” – a statement they base on his criticisms of BLM and his description of Grant Shapps as “globalist”. They also cite his support for a referendum on Net Zero as “not in line with the banks views”. Amongst Farage’s other thought crimes were his support for the current UK government’s Rwanda policy, his description of Prince Charles as “stupid” and his “comments on women’s football”…

Once again, I commend the report to readers, especially the first two pages. Page 2 states that a third party organisation would ‘undertake monthly Adverse Press checks on NF’ with a view to ‘an earlier exit to be considered if an event occurs that amplifies the reputational risks associated with banking NF’.

Looking at the report’s mention of ‘Purpose’, as Guido cited, here is what Dame Alison Rose’s LinkedIn profile says:

Addressing ‘reputational risks’, Andrew Neil pointed out the mote in Coutts’s eye, mentioning that, in 2022, The Times reported the bank allowed the then-Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund to deposit a suitcase with €1million cash from the controversial former Qatari prime minister. Neil asks about the ethics involved there versus Nigel Farage’s reputation. He is not wrong:

Coutts’s report on Farage found no financial impropriety on his part:

Dame Alison Rose read history at Durham University yet heads the huge NatWest Group, likely because she has been working for NatWest since 1992, having begun her career as a management trainee. She graduated from Durham the year before.

In 2018, she led a Treasury review on barriers for women in business. Lucky her. It catapulted her to the top of the tree:

The Rose Review found that just one in three UK entrepreneurs is female and only one per cent of venture funding goes to all-female teams.^[14] In November 2018, she became deputy chief executive of NatWest Holdings.^[15]^[16]

In March 2019, the UK Government published a policy paper, the Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship.^[13]^[17] In April 2019, Rose was “widely-tipped” to succeed Ross McEwan as CEO.^[7]^[15]^[18]

Rose was the chief executive of commercial and private banking at Royal Bank of Scotland Group and deputy chief executive of NatWest Holdings.^[7]^[19] In September 2019, it was announced that she would succeed Ross McEwan as CEO of RBS Group on 1 November 2019, making her the “first woman to lead major UK lender”.^[20] RBS Group was re-named NatWest Group in 2020.

Rose was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to the financial sector^[21]^[22] and later that month she was given an honorary degree by the new Chancellor of York University Dr Heather Melville.^[23]

She is married to David Slade, who works for UBS. The couple have two children and live in Highgate (north London).

However, Dame Alison is not the only one who has made great strides in her banking career.

On July 3, Wings Over Scotland featured a profile of HSBC’s global lead on financial tracking. This, too, is of interest:

Hannah Graf MBE (below, right, receiving the decoration from Prince William in 2019 for his “work updating LGBTQ policy in the British Army”) is a very strange fella …

After joining the army straight out of university in 2009 and spending several years in it as a (gay) man, Graf “transitioned” to female in 2013. “It was literally an overnight thing, where one day I went home as a male officer and next day I came in as a female officer”, he told Channel 4 in 2021 in his still-deep and unmistakably male voice.

(He’d also appeared on the BBC six years earlier, under his original surname of Winterbourne, but his birth first name appears to have been scrubbed from history.)

But the really curious thing is that having spent the latter years of his military service as a glorified party-planner working in HR and recruitment, Graf inexplicably then walked straight into a senior job in financial-crime prevention with a big-four bank (HSBC), despite having precisely zero previous experience in finance, crime or banking.

One day just one of the lads, next day brave and stunning lady. One day squaddie, next day international money-laundering detective. Hannah’s quite the chameleon.

But I digress.

The Telegraph had several articles on the Farage story, published on Thursday night for Friday’s edition.

Reactions

Nigel Farage was broadcasting live on Thursday from Newport in Wales, one of his fortnightly visits around the country. He covered the apology in the opening segment (7:05 mark):

In ‘Farage bank scandal: NatWest and Coutts chief Dame Alison Rose apologises’, The Telegraph reported (purple emphases mine):

In a letter to Mr Farage, she said: “I am writing to apologise for the deeply inappropriate comments about yourself,” adding: “I would like to make it clear that they do not reflect the view of the bank.”

Mr Farage said he welcomed the apology, but believed she had been forced into it by the Treasury.

On his GB News show, he said he was “going to find out” if Dame Alison leaked his banking information to the BBC.

“On July 3 you were having dinner sitting next to the BBC’s economics correspondent Simon Jack,” he said, pointing out that the journalist rang him the next morning and posted on Twitter that his account had been closed because there was not enough money in it.

“The BBC put that out and many in the media accepted that version,” he said.

“Mr Jack for some reason seems to have gone to ground today and hasn’t backtracked from it.

“Can I ask you, Dame Alison, was it you? Was it you that breached my private client banking confidentiality? Was it you that told Simon Jack that?

“Well, I’m going to find out, because today I’ve put in another subject access request, this time to NatWest bank and in particular I’m looking for any personal correspondence, Dame Alison, that concerns me. So in 30 days’ time, we’ll know the absolute truth.”

The article helpfully mentioned that Farage filed:

a subject access request, which gives people the right to ask companies for a copy of any personal data held on them, under data protection laws.

The Information Commissioner’s Office has instructions on how to file a subject access request, which any member of the British public can do.

One of the criticisms Coutts made was that Farage supported Donald Trump. The Telegraph managed to contact the former president’s son Eric, who said:

For a bank to cancel an individual because of their political party or individual beliefs is asinine and dangerous.

A bank’s sole purpose is to safeguard and manage people’s money – not to infringe on their clients’ freedom of speech via threat of cancellation.

Citizens of the UK should be very fearful. If this can happen to Nigel Farage, it can happen to anyone – especially people who don’t have a public platform, voice, or ability to fight back.

The article also reported what Conservative MP and GB News presenter Jacob Rees-Mogg said:

Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former business secretary, called on NatWest to hold an inquiry into the leak – and sack the person responsible for it.

‌“If you are a public figure, you know your life is very public,” he said.

“There are a very small number of people you think who will maintain this confidence – your doctor, your bank manager, your accountant, and your lawyer.

“If you cannot rely on your bank to keep your information secret, then who can you deal with? It’s such a breach of trust.

“The bank should have an inquiry to find out who leaked this, and however senior the person is who leaked it, they should no longer be a banker. After all, a doctor who gossiped about a patient’s health condition would be struck off.”

Another Conservative MP, Andrew Griffith, said that new legislation would soon be in force for banks in this regard:

The Treasury announced earlier in the day that British banks will be subject to stricter rules over closing customers’ accounts – with Andrew Griffith, the City minister, warning that freedom of speech was the “cornerstone of our democracy”.

Banks will be forced to give a customer an explanation of why they are closing an account and will have to give them three months’ notice.

Mr Griffith said: “Banks occupy a privileged place in society, and it is right that we fairly balance the rights of banks to act in their commercial interest, with the right for everyone to express themselves freely.”

A third Conservative MP, Michael Fabricant, was unimpressed with the NatWest Group chief’s apology:

Sir Michael Fabricant, the Tory MP, called on Dame Alison to consider her position, saying: “Alison Rose will not have reassured customers with her response. She did not address the leaks which were a disgrace from a licensed bank. Nor has she offered Mr Farage his account back.

“In 2023, banking facilities are as vital as water or electricity supplies. It is a utility. Alison Rose should now seriously consider her future in banking.”

Meanwhile, the BBC had not yet apologised for reporting that Farage’s accounts were closed for financial reasons. That said, they finally retracted that part of the story in the 6 p.m. news bulletin:

On Thursday’s BBC News at Six, viewers were told that the broadcaster had previously quoted a source who rejected the notion that the decision to close Mr Farage’s account was in any way political and claimed it was a commercial decision.

The presenter said that information had been inaccurate. The report did not reveal who the source was.

It wasn’t until Friday, July 21, that Simon Jack wrote a retraction to a July 4 article:

Dame Alison and the BBC

On Wednesday, July 19, The Telegraph filed the story, ‘Bank chief Dame Alison sat next to BBC journalist night before he tweeted claim about Nigel Farage’:

The Grand Ballroom of London’s Langham Hotel is marketed as a luxurious space “where business meets pleasure”.

With its gilded pillars and spectacular chandeliers, it is the perfect setting for fundraising dinners where the great and the good gather to mix fine dining with philanthropy.

It is a splendid, traditional hotel — and is right across the street from the BBC in the heart of the capital.

The article continues:

One such occasion was this year’s BBC Correspondents’ Charity Dinner, held in aid of BBC Media Action. It was a glitzy affair, with tables hosted by the likes of Naga Munchetty, Jeremy Vine, Reeta Chakrabarti and Fergus Walsh, whose star power helped to draw in the sort of wealthy individuals who could make the night a success for the charity.

Another of the correspondents attending the event was Simon Jack, the BBC’s business editor and part-time presenter of Radio 4’s flagship Today programme.

Sitting by his side was Dame Alison Rose, the chief executive of NatWest bank. Other guests described them “laughing and joking together” during the meal …

The dinner took place on July 3, on the same day that the Daily Telegraph’s lead story reported the Chancellor’s “deep concerns” about banks blacklisting customers who hold controversial views.

One of those customers was Nigel Farage, who had disclosed days earlier that his accounts with Coutts had been closed “without explanation” but that he was convinced it had been done for political reasons.

Mr Jack, as BBC business editor, would naturally have taken a keen interest in the story, and happened to find himself sitting next to the boss of the bank that owns Coutts, Dame Alison.

Whether the two discussed Mr Farage, neither is prepared to say.

What is known, however, is that the next day, July 4, Mr Jack published an exclusive story on the BBC website headlined: “Nigel Farage bank account shut for falling below wealth limit”.

It quoted “people familiar with Coutts’ move” claiming that it had been a “commercial” decision to close Mr Farage’s personal and business accounts because he did not have enough money.

Both the BBC and NatWest declined to comment when the Telegraph asked what Mr Jack and Dame Alison had discussed during the meal.

Dame Alison has already come under pressure from MPs to resign after the matter escalated all the way to Downing Street, with Rishi Sunak saying Coutts’ actions had been “wrong” …

Mr Farage does not dispute that his finances dipped below the Coutts threshold of £3 million in savings or £1 million in borrowing or investment, but says the bank had never made an issue of it in the past. The document obtained by him also makes clear that he was considered a commercially viable customer.

According to Guido, the BBC were still at it this week. He provided a clip from a woman the network describes as a ‘banking’ and ‘financial’ commentator, Frances ‘Cassandra’ Coppola, who discussed Farage’s account closure with him present during a Newsnight segment:

Once again, the BBC is being economical with the truth.

Guido tells us:

Yet again, the BBC is failing its basic duty to provide transparency to viewers. In a discussion about Nigel Farage’s de-banking, Newsnight invited on Frances Coppola to provide an opposing view. Before claiming Farage’s views were unrelated to the bank’s decision, despite the 40-page dossier which explicitly claims banking Farage was “at odds with our position as an inclusive organisation“, Frances was introduced simply as a “banking commentator” and then a “financial commentator”. That introduction is inadequate.

Frances is more than a banking commentator – in her own words, she’s also a “broke centrist remoaner”. Looking further into her Twitter history only confirms this…

He provided a tart selection of tweets showing that this woman is clearly biased.

Agreed, but how can one take seriously a financial commentator who has the need for a fantasy name? ‘Cassandra’? Really?

Guilt by association

Veteran columnist Simon Heffer wrote an article for The Telegraph explaining how he had a financial blip after his bank linked him with Nigel Farage:

Four months ago, just before the end of the tax year, the very decent and capable man who advises me on my pension provisions dropped me a routine email.

He said that to cut my tax liability I should top up my pension fund before April 5. I did: but shortly after I had made the transfer of funds from my bank, he rang me in what I detected was a state of mild embarrassment.

Someone – I am not sure whether at the financial services firm for which my adviser works, or at the fund in which my pension is invested (a Standard Life SIPP) – had asked for more information about one aspect of my life before finally processing my additional investment.

Bemused, I asked what information they wanted – not being engaged in Russian sanctions-busting, money laundering or working as an agent of Beijing, I felt I had nothing to hide.

However, one of these institutions thought I had done something exceptionally dodgy: I was a friend of Nigel Farage.

This took me somewhat by surprise. I am indeed a friend of Nigel, whom I have known for 30 years. But we are not – how shall we say? – intimate. We have no business association of any description. I see him two or three times a year …

A lot of my friends do not know I am a friend of Nigel Farage. So how on earth did people in the financial services industry who handle the highly confidential area of my investments know it? And why, to put it bluntly, was it any of their bloody business?

My adviser was quite straight with me and told me my association with Nigel (if it can be aggrandised by that term) was of interest to the financial services industry because he was “a politically exposed person”, a term that, in my innocence, I had never heard up to that moment.

I made the nature of my association with Nigel clear to my adviser – and underlined the point that I do not have, and never have had, a financial relationship with him. My adviser was quite satisfied, my investment was accepted, and I put what seemed like an odd, but minor, matter behind me …

Had I had nothing to do at the time I would have made a point of looking into the question of what makes a politically exposed person, and indeed how and why someone had made it his or business to determine that I was a pal of one – and that details of Nigel Farage’s friendships and associations appear to have been shared right across the financial services industry.

But I was, at the time, taking on a pile of extra work tied to the impending Coronation, and working through the copy-edit of a 350,000-word book, and was too busy to think about it. I didn’t even get round to telling Nigel about this absurd incident. I now know he wouldn’t have been in the least surprised. But I now see it stinks to high heaven, in an attempt to weaponise the financial services industry on behalf of a whole political ideology against an opposing set of values …

My former colleague Dominic Lawson has written of problems he encountered trying to open a bank account for his daughter, who has Down’s syndrome: the problem was that his late father, Nigel Lawson, a man of impeccable probity, had had the effrontery to challenge the orthodoxy of climate change, and therefore was “politically exposed”.

The list of questions that Coutts has to answer is set to get longer …

In sharing such information as they found – such as who his friends were – were there breaches of data protection? Do I, and countless others, have a case in law against those who compiled the list of Farage friends? Indeed, never mind what improprieties have been perpetrated towards such friends and associates, what about the leak of confidential (and apparently false) information about his finances to the BBC? For that reason alone, shouldn’t Dame Alison have resigned? How can she begin to defend her behaviour?

In the sinister, public-relations driven obsession with diversity, inclusion and something called “equity”, institutions will now, it appears, say and do anything to appear to be on the right side of the woke orthodoxy. This now seems to include not just sacking customers for exercising their freedom of speech within the law, but digging dirt on them in a highly questionable fashion, and seeking to impede the financial lives of entirely innocent associates whose only crime is to be friends with people whose political views the diversity industry condemns. I wish I had an account with Coutts or NatWest, just so I could have the rapture of closing it.

Boris Johnson’s brother-in-law Ivo Dawnay — married to Rachel — also had a weird experience. Mexican officials had associated the two from his passport and denied Dawnay an exchange of dollars into pesos at the Mexico City airport. He wrote about this strange episode for The Spectator on July 8:

Nigel Farage and I don’t have too much in common beyond liking a pint and a cigar. Yet I now discover a link: we are both PEPs, or ‘politically exposed persons’. Such a handle may not be a total surprise to Nigel. (He may not have been surprised, either, when Coutts said that it had closed his bank account simply because he didn’t have enough funds.) But it certainly was to me – especially as I found out from an official at the bureau de change in the baggage hall of Mexico City airport.

As I proffered a couple of grubby $100 bills to change to pesos, I filled in a short form – name, address etc – then noticed the cashier looking quizzically at my passport. He called over a supervisor. My passport was analysed by a machine. After a few buzzes, bleeps and whirrs, a new form, almost identical to the first, was presented. But as I laboriously listed once again the address of my hotel, I noticed there was an additional question at the bottom. Was I a politically exposed person, it asked …

… as a man in his seventies – an OAP PEP perhaps – surely I couldn’t be too much of a threat to the government of President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador. After all, my $200 was not going to buy many armed-to-the-teeth banditos, given that they are fearfully tied up with the hideously complex logistics of cocaine trafficking, and I am not that good on stairs.

… So it was with confidence that I answered the question with a firm: ‘No.’

A dark frown spread across the manly brow of the supervisor, who returned to his computer, perused the data strip in my (still burgundy) passport one more time and said, with infinite good manners, but brooking no contradiction: ‘I am afraid our computer says you are. We cannot change your money.’

And then I finally understood. Yet another fine thing Boris has got me into. Not only must I forever shrink in my chair at fashionable dinner parties insisting like Cain (or was it Abel?) that ‘I am not my brother’s keeper’. I must now dodge the money-changers in the temples. The sins of the brothers-in-law, it seems, will always be with me, heaped upon my head at the exchange counters of the globe. Even the usurious clerks of Travelex, the ultimate pharisees of our times, will decline to do business with me. There will be an assumption that the $200 I proffer has been snitched from the No. 10 petty cash tin.

‘Don’t worry,’ said the kindly cashier, spotting my consternation. ‘We are a government exchange bureau. Any of the ones outside in the arrival hall will happily take your money.’

Funny peculiar, really. But I do think that Thomson Reuters, who I hear make a tidy profit flogging dog-eared information from their cuttings to the world’s border guards, should be accountable – or perhaps some other free-enterprise data snitch.

If we can legally check our credit ratings, surely the same should be applicable to our relative political radioactivity? Or is that a state secret not to be shared? All I know is someone seems to have been messing with the data strip in my passport – my soon-to-be-surrendered last link to the long-lost European empire over the sea.

On that subject, The Telegraph believes that ‘NatWest faces wave of data requests after Nigel Farage scandal’.

The paper says there were ’13 tweets that cost Nigel Farage his Coutts bank account’.

The paper also has queries: ‘Nigel Farage bank row: 10 questions Coutts and NatWest must answer’.

Heads must roll

Their columnist Alison Pearson says ‘Dame Alison Rose must now resign as head of NatWest’:

Last year, her pay packet was £5.25 million, a big chunk of that courtesy of the taxpayer, who owns 39 per cent of NatWest (and thus Coutts) since its bailout during the 2008 financial crisis. Now, in a desperate attempt to stem the furore over Nigel Farage and his closed accounts at Coutts, she has emailed him to apologise. But fine words butter no parsnips. Dame Alison must resign.

A friend who used to be extremely senior at Coutts, and still keeps in touch with former colleagues, says that the scandal over the private bank terminating Nigel Farage’s account was “depressingly inevitable. The forces of woke have wrought havoc there,” he says, “The trouble is members of staff are bullied into compliance with these ‘progressive’ edicts.”

My friend is appalled at the naivety and delusions of the present executives. “These people think they are invulnerable and have little awareness of the outside world. They talk to themselves and listen only to sycophants who will never gainsay them. If what they are said to have done to Farage is accurate it’s disgustingly disgraceful. I’m ashamed of what the bank has become”…

ESG stands for Environmental, Social and Governance, typically referring to policies that prioritise long-term environmental and social sustainability when making investments and other banking decisions. ESG can include social issues regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion plus the inevitable climate change.

Which brings us back to Nigel Farage and Coutts …

Home Secretary Suella Braverman is right to say the Coutts scandal exposes the “sinister nature” of the “diversity, equity and inclusion industry”. The Farage farrago will undoubtedly lose the bank clients. Serious wealth does not like publicity.

“It may score Brownie points with the Islington dinner-party circuit who are not Coutts’ customers anyway,” observes my source, “but it will lose a whole raft of landowners who are naturally conservative, and families who have banked with Coutts for generations. They will be horrified. ‘Why on earth should my political views influence the holding of my account?’, that will be their attitude”…

Perhaps Farage’s clash with Coutts will mark a watershed. An emergency law is set to be introduced to prevent banks “cancelling” account holders. The Government needs to do that quickly. Banks which do not protect the free speech of customers could lose their licences, and rightly so. How dare bankers in their fifties behave like teenage Maoists with other people’s money.

… But we have to keep fighting the good fight for the sake of our children and grandchildren. We just have to.

Thomas Coutts must be spinning in his grave. He was always prepared to bank anyone, especially those who were being persecuted and even went to Paris at the height of the French Revolution to help beleaguered aristocrats. Would Coutts have considered Nigel Farage’s money to be as good as the next man’s? You can bank on it.

Small shareholders in NatWest have been writing the group’s chairman Sir Howard Davies. One has said that Camilla Stowell of Coutts should also go:

Change is coming

And, finally, The Telegraph‘s ‘Banks to be forced to explain why they close accounts thanks to Brexit’ tells us:

Banks will have to explain why they are shutting down someone’s account under the new rules. They previously have not had to provide a rationale for doing so.

The Government has also extended the notice period for a forced account closure from 30 days to 90 days, which it said gives customers more time to challenge the decision through the Financial Ombudsman Service or find a replacement bank.

The Treasury said the new rules were only possible because Britain had left the EU …

The Treasury said the changes can only be made due to new powers in the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023, which gave the UK control of its financial rulebook following Brexit.

The proposed changes follow a call for evidence launched in January, following PayPal’s temporary suspension of several accounts last year. It found that changes were needed to ensure the right balance is being struck between protecting customers, and providers’ rights to manage commercial risk.

They require secondary legislation, which will be delivered through the powers granted in the Financial Services and Markets Act 2023, as part of the Government’s programme in building a smarter regulatory framework for UK financial services.

This runs alongside separate plans to clarify in legislation the requirements for politically exposed persons, and a review into whether these are being applied proportionately by financial institutions.

The Financial Conduct Authority will set out how they intend to conduct the review by the end of September.

It cannot come soon enough.

Next week I will look at this week’s by-election results in detail: there was a piece of the pie for Conservatives (Uxbridge and South Ruislip), Labour (Selby and Ainsty) and the Lib Dems (Somerton and Frome).

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Tag Archive

Banking news: Farage update, banks’ conduct and the Irish view

Coutts CEO Peter Flavel resigns, NatWest chairman Howard Davies vows to stay

Davies: political reaction forced “great leader” Alison Rose out

Farage supports Gina Miller over bank account access

Nils Pratley: It will be surprising if NatWest’s Howard Davies hasn’t gone by Christmas

Farage’s bank account saga: following NatWest CEO’s departure, could more heads roll?

Victory for Nigel Farage as NatWest chief Dame Alison Rose resigns

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Bank chief apologises to Farage — but no reinstatement of account

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