I never like to rush letters. They need to be well thought out, written, considered, edited, considered, edited again and then sent. News is so fast these days you could write a letter today and by tomorrow everything could change and your letter could be out of date and pointless. So I’m glad SME Alliance didn’t send the letter we wrote to Ross McEwan at RBS a few days ago because it would have been absolutely pointless.

The basis of our letter was in these two paragraphs:

As we understand it, the majority of businesses entitled to redress are already in administration or liquidation. As such, the business owners who have been mistreated or suffered loss will have no locus to request redress or compensation and only the administrators or liquidators can make any claim on behalf of the insolvent businesses. Therefore any repayment or award will end up paying the fees of the Insolvency practitioners or with the creditors of those businesses – of which your Bank is likely to be the major creditor.

If the above scenario is the reality of your proposed scheme it would be a highly cynical house keeping exercise and of little or no assistance to the business owners who have been so poorly treated. Aside from the fact £400M seems a totally inadequate figure for the serious damage caused to thousands of small businesses, we are concerned that, as in the case of the IRHP redress scheme, this scheme will fail to acknowledge or address the real issues – that in many instances your employees, presumably as a matter of policy, have behaved dishonestly to your customers and that is the prime reason for so many insolvencies.

Apparently that scenario is exactly what will happen with the scheme. The thousands of SMEs who have been placed in an insolvent position because of RBS GRG will have absolutely no right to claim redress.

It seemed illogical to me and others in SME Alliance that anyone would be quite that blatantly offensive to society. After all, SMEs represent over 90% of private business and employ millions of people. So when you take out 16,000 SMEs, you cause literally thousands of people to lose their jobs. And when people lose their jobs, it follows they can’t pay their mortgage so they lose their homes.

Just hold that thought for a moment. Just imagine you have done nothing wrong, a Bank has destabilised your business and taken your assets and to finish you off and so that you are so traumatised you can’t fight back, they take your family home. You and your children must pack up and go……. where? And why?

I keep playing this video clip because I keep hoping someone senior in RBS will watch this video of Nigel Henderson’s “Who Amongst You” speech at the Cambridge International Symposium On Economic Crime last September  and say “Oh my God, why on earth did we do this to this man and his family?” No such luck: http://www.smealliance.org/blog/who-among-you-extract-from-nigel-hendersons-powerful-speech

The conduct of RBS GRG has no doubt had a huge effect on society – the same society that bailed it out for billions of pounds.

I’m sure many SMEs read the announcement that RBS would be giving firms redress and thought their nightmare was over because the whole RBS GRG scam was exposed. But it seems that is not the case. The Bank appointed insolvency practitioners will do very well out of this deal and the Bank, as a major creditor to the companies it pulled down will be paying much of the £400M allotted back to themselves as a major creditor. Even if every penny of the proposed £400M really went to the people who most deserved it, that would work out at a maximum of £33,000 – that’s a couple of days wages to some senior bankers.

The fact remains – RBS was run so disastrously it ended up with billions of pounds of debt and had the public, via the Government, not bailed it out it would have gone to the wall. This is the Bank that felt it could run thousands of SMEs better than their owners. It was always obvious that couldn’t happen and I think some would suggest the GRG department of RBS could only run its own business and any business it was involved with straight into a wall – a brick wall. All the same we bailed it out and continued to pay it’s bosses millions of pounds to fail with vigour.

The Bank’s way of thanking its major shareholder since 2008 is to carry on with business as usual, destroying thousands of SMEs and, when it was finally exposed as an unethical and immoral organisation, it’s answer has been to come up with this cynical plan which will leave most of its victims in the same position.

While RBS are not the only Bank to take such a cynical approach to the people that saved it, it is perhaps the most disappointing. Certainly SME Alliance is disappointed any Bank would be quite so cavalier in its destruction of people’s lives but we are also very disappointed the so called ‘regulator’ of the banking sector would allow this to happen and condone this plan which is no more than a diabolical bit of house keeping by RBS.

If you own an SME that was destroyed by RBS GRG I would suggest you think carefully before joining any scheme proposed by RBS. Not every cloud has a silver lining and not every person has a moral streak. It seems this scheme is offensive and ridiculous.