Page 230 - Bank Case Studies

2016 BuzzFeed & BBC

Newsnight

In October, 2016 a cache of

confidential documents were

passed, by a whistleblower,

to BuzzFeed News and BBC Newsnight, which supported the

allegations made in the 2013, Tomlinson Report. Essentially,

that RBS secretly tried to profit from struggling businesses

by buying their assets cheaply as a deliberate plan to add

billions of pounds to its balance sheet, whilst claiming

publicly to be helping them.

More than 12,000

companies were pushed

into RBS’ GRG Division

especially in the aftermath

of the 2008 financial crisis.

Some of these companies
were subjected to GRG

simply for falling out with the bank or indicating that they

were thinking of changing bank.

“The internal documents starkly contradict the

bank’s public insistence that GRG acted as an

“intensive care unit” for ailing firms, tasked with

restructuring their loan agreements to “help them

back to health”. (25)