By John Ward
Suspicions grow as Royal Bank of Scotland refuses to hand over records to Canadian authorities
Libor investigation spreads to encompass RBS misreporting in Yen
Source claims Treasury behind refusal
Following its recent highly-convenient and lucrative glitch, the New York Times this morning reports that RBS is battling to stop Canadian regulators from having access to its files, in a case seeking evidence of false Libor reporting. Ottowan Court records show that the bank bossed by Simon Hester is refusing to turn over crucial information to Canadian regulators. Slog sources in the UK have been filling in some of pieces of what looks increasingly like a potentially revealing jigsaw.
The Slog has been on the case of RBS pretty much since the day Freddie Badloss tried to buy ABNAmro. The mess internally was never properly cleared up, the bank still has radioactive exposure to South and East European loans: plus, the Government (more in terms of Whitehall than Westminster) has been devious bordering on mendacious about the state it’s in.
Just to put this into some kind of perspective – and bring the ginormous bill up to date – the National Audit Office (NAO) points out the following:
“Unless the shares in RBS and Lloyds Banking Group start paying substantial dividends, the Government as a whole will make annual cash losses on the support once the cost of borrowing the money used to purchase the shares and provide the loans is taken into account,” it says. Many of us insisted this was the case from Day One, as a counterpoint to Alistair Darling’s ridiculous lies about the taxpayer “coming out of this with a substantial profit”. In fact, we lose over £2bn on the deal every year, while our continuing support and liabilities remain astronomical: cash injections into RBS in the last fiscal came to £66bn, and ldebt guarantees are still over £75bn. We have (Sir) Fred to thank for this, the removal of whose knighthood caused a storm of protest from the bankers’ pr machine, with the usual ‘Shows Britain isn’t open for business” bollocks. No chaps, it showed that Britain is not up for knighting idiots who take the piss.
Read the rest of the article here: The Slog
