Latest FSA inquest into RBS collapse set to ignore Goodwin’s role

SIR Fred Goodwin, former chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, is expected to be let off the hook again in a long-awaited report into the bank’s collapse by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) due next week.

The report is being published a year after the FSA closed its original investigation into the bank’s failure, in which it exonerated the bank’s board and management of any wrongdoing. Outrage at the brevity of the watchdog’s first attempt at investigating the problems at RBS led to an agreement that a fuller report would be published, led by City grandees Sir David Walker and Bill Knight.

It is understood that the report, due to be published on 12 December, will not examine the role of Goodwin or that of the former chairman Sir Tom McKillop.

Instead, it will look at the part played by Johnny Cameron, the head of RBS’s investment bank and the only senior bank board member to have been censured by the FSA. Cameron was prohibited from performing any “significant influence function” in a financial firm in May, 2010.

The report is also expected to be highly critical of the role the FSA itself played in regulating the bank in the run up to its acquisition of ABN Amro when it was clear that the industry was heading for a crisis.

City sources said of the 500-page report “it will be what it doesn’t say that will be more interesting than what it does say”.

RBS posted the biggest loss in UK corporate history in 2008 and required the largest bank bail-out in the world.

Reports on the weekend have also revealed that RBS, which is 83 per cent owned by the taxpayer, is expected to pay £500 million in bonuses to its investment bankers this year, an amount that is set to be confirmed in February, less than the £950m paid out last year.

ERIKKA ASKELAND