Financial Conduct Authority

Gary Streeter Excerpts

Monday 1st February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gary Streeter (South West Devon) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Aberconwy (Guto Bebb) on securing this debate and on his tenacity in pursuing this issue. I fully support the motion. I am not at all happy with the FCA’s performance in resolving the swap issue. I have had experience of several constituency cases that have revealed a very slow process with insufficient redress, and the independent review process appears to be anything but independent. So I have no confidence at all in this FCA scheme.

This interest rate swap mis-selling scandal is one of the greatest scandals in recent decades, but because it is complicated and because it primarily affects businesses and not consumers, it has received insufficient attention from the Government and from the media. At the same time as this has been in play, the Government have been more concerned about the survival of the banking system in its entirety and about getting the nationalised banks ready for re-privatisation as quickly as possible. I can understand that, but it is perhaps for those reasons that they have not been robust enough with the FCA, whose oversight of this mis-selling has been weak, toothless and anaemic from the very beginning. This has been mis-selling on an industrial scale and we have hardly got to grips with it at all.

Several of our constituents have lost their livelihoods and businesses as a direct result of bank wrongdoing. I believe that many of the senior banking executives who were behind this scandal should now be doing time in prison, but sadly that is not the case. One of the major shortcomings of the FCA scheme is the exclusion of so-called sophisticated borrowers, based on the size of lending and the size of the company. That was always nonsense. The swaps became so complicated that even the people inflicting them on their customers did not understand them. A former colleague at my old law firm, Clifford Chance, confided in me a few years ago that these arrangements were so complicated that even the lawyers drafting them did not always understand them. Setting up a system that assumed that companies over a certain size, which were perhaps good at making and selling widgets or at providing commercial premises, could get their minds around some of these swaps is nonsense, especially as many swaps were sold with no paperwork at the time and were simply done over the phone or in meetings, and often under tremendous pressure.

As I mentioned to the House when we first discussed these issues, a company called London and Westcountry Estates Limited in my constituency was the victim of a swap mis-selling by the Royal Bank of Scotland, one of the worst perpetrators of this scandal. Matters went from bad to worse, as the company’s debt was sold off by RBS to a third party company, Isobel, which then promptly placed the company into administration. I intend to raise that sorry saga with the House on a separate occasion; it goes beyond the scope of this debate, but, inch by inch, detail by detail, that story needs to be told, and it was all done with taxpayers’ money.

The family behind that constituency company were brilliant at buying old commercial premises and converting them into small units to let on flexible terms to small businesses—the very thing we want to encourage in our economy—but they had no understanding of complex financial instruments. When they first asked me to help some years ago, it took me, with my brilliant first-class degree in law—I knew I should say that, as nobody else would—and 15 years’ experience as a corporate lawyer, days to get my head around the swap they had been sold, which was completely inappropriate for their business. How on earth were they supposed to understand it? But because they were, ludicrously, deemed “sophisticated borrowers”, they were excluded from the FCA scheme and are having to resort to litigation to get justice. I believe they will win and win heavily, but it should not be necessary and it sickens me that RBS is defending this litigation with taxpayers’ money—that just does not seem right at all. I also believe that the RBS executives responsible for selling these swaps and for placing the company into administration, even though it never missed a monthly or quarterly debt repayment, should be prosecuted under criminal law and face whatever charge the criminal law throws at them. I intend to pursue that when the outcome of the court case is known next year and the full facts are exposed.

It is well known that I am a loyal supporter of this Government, as are you, Mr Deputy Speaker, I know. Who could not be?

[Daniel Kawczynski]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the swaps—the derivatives—were deliberately made to be so complicated that our constituents would have no opportunity to understand them?

[Mr Streeter]

I suspect that that is the case—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. May I just remind everybody that the Chair certainly will not be favouring any Government, for or against?

[Mr Streeter]

We all knew that, Mr Deputy Speaker.

It is perfectly possible that the swaps were designed to be so complicated that they could not be understood. Primarily, they were designed in a way as to make the selling bank vast sums of commission, and it was all done in the name of commercial greed. Nobody minds a profit, but this went well beyond that. Although I am a loyal supporter of this Government, we have an FCA compensation scheme that is pitiful and, as a result, we are in danger of letting our constituents down. However, it is not too late for the Government to get a grip on the FCA and sort this matter out.