Many small businessman vote Conservative thinking that because they have nice houses they are part of the gentry, but the Tory Party doesn't care about them. Look at this report. The Royal Bank of Scotland bankrupted small viable businesses on purpose to make massive profits amounting in the £billions. The Tory Party have the Financial Conduct Authority report but have decided to do nothing. In capitalism the big fish eat the little fish all the way down to the bottom. KV
How many thousands of RBS business customers need to lose their livelihoods, homes, health, and marriages before the Tory government warrants its crimes heinous enough to take action?
Tens of billions of small business dollars, perhaps more, were lost to banking malfeasance and fraud over more than three decades. After hearing countless accounts in the House of Commons on Thursday about how British business owners were deliberately and systematically bankrupted and then left to, by its own words, “hang themselves”, the government announced its intention to do… well, nothing in the medium term.
Economic Secretary to the Treasury, John Glen claimed the government could not determine what further action should be taken, if any, until the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), concludes its investigation into matters arising from its 2015 skilled persons report. For its part, the FCA claimed that it would finally be addressing the report after more than three years on Monday the 22nd of January, but beyond increasing access to the financial ombudsman, we’ve barely heard a peep from the regulator.
RBS was bailed out to the tune of £45 billion in 2008 and has subsequently racked up £58 billion in losses in the nine years that followed.
The government could have bailed out every single one of the thousands of small-business customers defrauded and lied to by RBS and its counterparts at HBOs and Lloyds, nationalised the lot, and it likely would have cost less.
“More like an abattoir”
Here are just a handful of accounts from RBS customers who were deliberately and systematically bankrupted to shore up its balance sheets, to cover its losses during the financial crisis and subsidise its continued high-risk activity:
– RBS forced Andi Gibbs to buy an interest rate-hedging product that should have mitigated against rising interest rates, but in fact drained it of cash. It was then placed into its Global Restructuring Group (GRG) which set about forcibly bankrupting the business.
“Gibbs lost his business, his home, his marriage and, I think it is fair to say, almost his sanity. His crime: nothing more than being an entrepreneur who banked with RBS,” said Clive Lewis.
– Andrea Willows’ business was profitable when RBS refused to provide any funding for a shorter-term loan payoff, attributing it all to a larger loan pay-off that requiring her to come up with the full cost of about £635,000, making the continuity of the business completely impossible.
– In 1998, the GRG engineered the fall of Eric Topping’s building and joinery business, Pickup and Bradbury Ltd, which was forced into liquidation after the bank demanded aggressive repayment plans and did not allow sufficient time for company directors to appoint independent valuers to prove the worth of the company’s assets and its solvency.
The bank’s advisers consistently undervalued the company’s assets while overvaluing its liabilities, supporting its claim the company was unviable. In July 1998, Pickup and Bradbury was forced into receivership.
More Here -“Far from being an intensive care unit, it was more like an abattoir, where they were stripped and taken apart,” said Clive Lewis.
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