The Forfeiture Committee is to consider whether it should act to strip Sir Fred Goodwin of the knighthood he received in 2004 for his services to banking. The former head of the Royal Bank of Scotland has caused widespread public and political anger after he took early retirement and subsequently got a £700,000 yearly pension from the bank he so nearly bankrupted. Goodwin to be stripped of knighthood?
The troubled Royal Bank of Scotland announced today the devastating news they are to cut 9,000 jobs worldwide. 4,500 of those are in the UK. The jobs cut will be ‘backroom staff’, eg employees who cannot under any circumstances be blamed for the crisis the bank finds itself in. Poor RBS.
Sir Fred Goodwin is currently one of the most unpopular men in the UK. The former head of RBS, the bank that this week announced a £24,1 billion loss – the largest in UK corporate history, has said he fully intends to keep his pension plan. A plan that gives him £693,000 a year from a bank he promptly left when the government had to bail it out last October. A very expensive lesson learned.
The Royal Bank of Scotland has been in dire straits. So dire that it had to receive £20bn of taxpayers money to not go bust. On top of that, they are expected to post losses of billions of pounds in three weeks time. So imagine my surprise when I learned today that RSB has set aside £1bn to be paid out as bonuses. For what? Is the practice of a bonus not to award someone who has helped their business succeed, not fail? RBS bankers might receive ‘taxpayer’ bonus.