Row builds over FSA's delayed report into RBS

Publication of the FSA’s report into the Royal Bank of Scotland’s financial collapse in 2008 has been delayed by a month.

In one of the biggest corporate collapses in global financial history, RBS was given £45bn of taxpayers’ money plus hundreds of billions of pounds worth of state loans, insurance and guarantees.

The FSA never wanted to make its report public, instead publishing a brief, 304-word, 12-sentence news statement on December 2. This announced that the investigation was closed and essentially did no more than let RBS’s senior managers, including chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin, off the hook.

Instead of blaming individuals, it blamed ‘bad decisions’.

In the uproar that followed, the FSA said that it could not publish a report without the permission of RBS.

After pressure from the Government, the FSA chairman Lord Turner caved in a week later. He agreed that the FSA would publish some form of a report in March.

However, amidst persistent whispers that there never was a report to be published, it emerged over the weekend that there will now be no publication until at least April.

The Sunday Telegraph yesterday reported that of more than 20 individuals that the newspaper itself had interviewed, many had not been contacted by the FSA. Those individuals included current and former RBS managers.

The newspaper said that Goodwin himself had only been interviewed once by the FSA, and that the discussion had been limited to broad issues, not the specifics of the bank’s failure.

The FSA spend 19 months investigating RBS, and paid £7.7m in fees to Pricewaterhouse Coopers.

By contrast, the Telegraph spent two months conducting its own investigation, the results of which are currently being splashed in both its Sunday and weekday titles.