RBS chairman refutes MP’s allegations he misled Parliament

Royal Bank of Scotland chairman Sir Howard Davies has hit back at shadow Treasury minister and Labour MP Clive Lewis who this week accused him and the bank’s chief executive of misleading parliament over the scandal of the bank’s notorious Global Restructuring Group.

Mr Lewis claimed that Sir Howard and the bank’s chief executive, Ross McEwan, had told MPs last week that the unit’s poor conduct was down to “isolated incidents of poor governance” when a leaked regulatory report said that the practice of forcing thousands of struggling firms to the wall and stripping them of their assets was, in fact, “widespread” and “systematic”.

Sir Howard said that Mr Lewis must “correct” the statement he made in parliament on Tuesday alleging that Sir Howard and Ross McEwan, the bank’s chief executive, had misled the Treasury select committee with their comments.

Mr Lewis also claimed that RBS executives “had a stated policy of misleading” MPs.

According to The Times, a letter written by Sir Howard to Mr Lewis, which has been by the newspaper, claims Mr Lewis’ comments were “not a fair or accurate characterisation”.

He added: “I would ask that you revisit the evidence for your comment as, without correction, there is a risk that has been misled.”

Meanwhile, Nicky Morgan, chair of the Treasury Select Committee has demanded that the Financial Conduct Authority’s full report into how the GRG unit mistreated small businesses must be published by the end of next week.

The FCA has so far only released a summary of the report, which Clive Lewis has described as a “sanitised” version.

The Ms Morgan’s committee now says the full FCA report, which was leaked to the BBC last year, must be published or submitted to the committee by 16 February.

In a letter to the FCA, Ms Morgan said: “The committee considers it unreasonable that, four years since the review was commissioned, and 18 months since the FCA received the final report, such slow progress has been made towards meeting its objective… of placing the report in the public domain.”

An FCA spokesperson said it had received the letter from the Treasury committee and would respond.