Across the pond

Sir Frederick Goodwin, the disgraced former boss of the Royal Bank of Scotland, today resisted all calls from the Government and from the press, and from ordinary citizens, including former employees and the millions who entrusted their savings to him, to waive at least part of the £650,000 a year pension he is taking from RBS at aged 50. Yes, 50. And quite fit enough to earn his bread by collecting our rubbish.

If he needed the money. Which he does not, because he is not short of the odd penny.

When he got the job as boss of RBS in 2001 he insisted that he was so much better than anyone else that he needed a salary of £3 million a year.

Let me repeat, £3 million a year. Not for doing a job that required rocket science, but for doing a job which required honesty, integrity and caution. Namely looking after the savings and current accounts of millions of depositors, who entrusted their savings to the High Street banks, like RBS and NatWest, which it also owned.

In fact, he orchestrated an ambitious expansion programme buying up many more companies. In this Goodwin (or Badwin, as I would call him if I was working for Private Eye) was not alone. Many other banking bosses were doing similiar things. And they should be brought to account.

But for today I am writing about Fred the Shed, so-called because he was so good at getting rid of the bank employees who were no longer necessary in an age when we get our cash from those holes in the wall.

And although the Government is taking legal advice it may be that Badwin is legally entitled to take his vast pension, despite the mess he has made of RBS and despite the fact that if the Government had let RBS go bust, he would have been entitled only to £20,000 a year. So he would not have starved.

Unlike some of the 20,000 employees of RBS who are likely to be fired as the new RBS management tries to cut costs.

Sir Fred is a not a career High Street banker, who were told when I was a young man, that there’s was not a glamourous high paid job, but it was in important one, looking after people’s savings, and giving advice to hundreds of individuals and small businessmen, to help them not to get into a financial mess.

Fred made his name, when, as a career accountant with a top firm, he was given the task of sorting out fraudulent banking activities of a Pakistani crook, who had built up a vast empire in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Though only 32 he did that job brilliantly and managed to recover around half of the money which had been squandered.

So Fred built his career as a gamekeeper, but he went on to lose far more money than BCCI had dreamt of acquiring. Not because he was a crook. But because he was a mis-guided honest man who allowed his own judgment to be guided by the conventional wisdom of the times. When almost all the bankers were jumping on the bandwagon of the un-regulated capitalism espoused by Thatcher, Reagan and the Bush family.

Today it was the Conservative Party spokesman in the House of Commons, who described Goodwin’s behaviour as ‘obscene’.

Has Goodwin no remorse?

Have any of the bankers who voted themselves similarly huge salaries and went on to violate all the rules of prudent High Street banking no remorse?

And for Goodwin and the rest is £650,000 a year worth it compared with the verdict of history, which his children and grandchildren will have to live with.

That Fred, who launched his career by exposing ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’ ended his career, by dis-crediting capitalsm.