Financial Services (Banking Reform) Bill

Debate between Lord James of Blackheath and Lord Eatwell

Wednesday 27th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord James of Blackheath (Con)]

My Lords, I have a reputation for introducing sidetrack issues which distract the House. However, I have just listened very intently to the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, and I think that I disagree with most of what he said. I would like to cite a case history and then invite him to say how what he said would relate to it.

I was very concerned to read in recent weeks about the Royal Bank of Scotland being accused of deliberately pulling down companies. I believe that I have been involved in one of those cases as the person brought in from outside to engineer the kind of scenario that that bank has been accused of engineering. I shall explain what occurred and then ask the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, how this relates to his perceptions of a duty of care and fiduciary responsibility.

Once upon a time in a muddy field in the Herefordshire area, a man who had come back from the war bought a caravan in which he lived with his wife. He hit upon the idea of a much more efficient process for aerating water for soft drinks and decided to go into production. He went from very small beginnings, with nothing more than his Army gratuity from the war, but by 1986 he was making £19 million a year profit and doing very nicely indeed. However, at that point his wife found him sleeping with his secretary and thought that that was pretty poor loyalty for nearly 40 years of dedicated support, so divorce proceedings were instigated but by this time they had a son. The son brought an action to prohibit his parents divorcing and dividing his asset between them. I believe that it is the only such action that has ever been brought.

He won his case so they had a settlement whereby the wife went to live in Monte Carlo, the husband stayed with the company and the son owned the company. However, the son now decided that his father had really not done very well with the company, although he had got it to £19 million a year, and that he could do a great deal better. So he went to Lloyds Bank. The company had nil borrowings at that time, not a penny. This is where I disagree with the noble Lord’s analysis, because it is not a question of what you do with the deposits—there is no cash being used from a bank at all here. He said, “Give me £75 million of borrowings and I will create a much bigger and better company out of this, in which we can all have a vast amount of earnings”. Lloyds Bank looked at his plan and his options and said yes. I challenge the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, on this. The first breach in fiduciary responsibility was that the bank said yes. It was not a question of what happened with the deposit, but a question of an ill advised loan, because the company was quite adequate as it was.

Lloyds gave him the £75 million and he went out and bought the plushest factory and upgraded every bit of engineering he could to put into it. Finally, after two years he re-opened and immediately found that he was losing £600,000 a month, at which point Lloyds sent for me. I found that the company was not losing £600,000 a month. It was losing more than £1.5 million a month and at that level we would be way out. All that the bank wanted was to get its money back. One might say that it did not deserve to get it back—in some respects I would agree with that—but we got it back in the end because we were able to break the business up into its various components. The splendid factory could be sold to Mitsubishi for quite a lot of money, the business streams could be sold for another £30 million or £40 million, and then we discovered that the company had the most valuable crop of freshwater springs in the Lake District of any British company. We sold it for tens of millions of pounds and got the bank out 100%, whereupon the son decided that he wanted to sue the bank for failure of fiduciary responsibility for lending him the £75 million in the first place. He said that the bank had engineered to bring the company down so that it could strip it out, take all his money and ruin his family and descendants for all time.

This is the reality behind what noble Lords are hearing about the Royal Bank of Scotland at the present time. Banks are pressured into making bad decisions to lend and they then take appropriate defensive action on behalf of their shareholders and depositors. That is discharging their fiduciary responsibility, but they have been put under pressure by other market forces to invest in businesses which really do not know what they are doing and when the time comes to dismantle, dismember and unbundle them, we get the sort of consequence we have had here. This individual failed in his action against the bank for having stolen his company, as he put it. He is now very ill, I am sorry to say, and is unlikely to last long in this world. His family is ruined completely—it has lost everything. Is that a fiduciary responsibility? Yes. The bank should have looked much more closely at the options that were available to the business at the time and should have looked to see what expertise was going to be brought in, and it did not. As to whether there is a duty of care, that is a very simple and separate issue running alongside. I think that there is and that that is where the concentration should be.

[Lord Eatwell]

I should point out to the noble Lord that the case he has described would come, under the terms of my amendment, under duty of care, not fiduciary responsibility.