Cher belting out If I Could Turn Back Time in Las Vegas last year
Many small businesses that borrowed from RBS before the financial crisis may have some regrets about that decision.
However, not as many, it would seem, as the UK’s FCA has over commissioning a report into what exactly was going on at the UK bank’s global restructuring group (GRG) when their loans turned sour.
The 361-page report, written by consultants Promontory Financial Group and commissioned by the FCA, looked into RBS’s mistreatment of many small and medium-sized enterprises that had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the GRG in the recession that followed the 2008 financial crisis.
The FCA was forced earlier this year to publish the report, which revealed in lurid and highly unflattering detail the approach taken by the GRG to customer care at that time.
As the bank’s regulator, the FCA (previously the Financial Services Authority) didn’t exactly come away smelling of roses either.
Cher classic
As part of the judicial review of the winding up of the GRG, it has emerged that Simone Ferreira, the FCA’s then head of the event supervision department – which dealt with the GRG – made her feelings over the situation clear at a 2016 meeting with RBS employees, where she sang the Cher classic If I Could Turn Back Time to the assembled RBS bankers.