RBS wanted Ginetta boss's mortgage back!

[dandarez]

Just watched Panorama. Ginetta boss Lawrence Tomlinson who wrote the report for the government criticising RBS etc.
RBS stopped him banking with them and told him to take his mortgage and find another bank! Other businesses highlighted too who were, well, finished off!

This country!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30146247

Watch on i-player.

edit - if hurried heading a bit confusing, apols.

Edited by dandarez on Monday 24th November 21:39

[anonymous-user]

He's better off without them.

I moved my personal stuff from them earlier this year after almost thirty years. I wish I'd done it years ago.

[Chim]

To be honest, it's their business. Let me put it to you this way, you run a shop and one of your customers decides that you sell st and stands outside your shop telling everyone that will listen that your business is crap would you still sell to him or tell him to fk off.

Personally I would tell him to fk off, if he thinks the business is that bad why the fook is he still banking there anyway.

[davepoth]

Chim said:

To be honest, it's their business. Let me put it to you this way, you run a shop and one of your customers decides that you sell st and stands outside your shop telling everyone that will listen that your business is crap would you still sell to him or tell him to fk off.

Personally I would tell him to fk off, if he thinks the business is that bad why the fook is he still banking there anyway.

Let me put it another way. The person who owns around 75% of the shop asks you what you think of it. You tell him. Then the manager decides to ban you from the shop without checking with the owner.

[Derek Smith]

Chim said:

To be honest, it's their business. Let me put it to you this way, you run a shop and one of your customers decides that you sell st and stands outside your shop telling everyone that will listen that your business is crap would you still sell to him or tell him to fk off.

Personally I would tell him to fk off, if he thinks the business is that bad why the fook is he still banking there anyway.

I think banks have to conform to certain restrictions and the suggestion/accusation, of being vindictive, does cross that line.

[Chim]

davepoth said:

Let me put it another way. The person who owns around 75% of the shop asks you what you think of it. You tell him. Then the manager decides to ban you from the shop without checking with the owner.

Wow, he OWNS 75% percent of RBS. Someone should let him know that.

[BGARK]

I should have been on that programme!

[Meoricin]

Chim said:

davepoth said:

Let me put it another way. The person who owns around 75% of the shop asks you what you think of it. You tell him. Then the manager decides to ban you from the shop without checking with the owner.

Wow, he OWNS 75% percent of RBS. Someone should let him know that.

You could do with some reading comprehension, that isn't what he said, or implied.

[davepoth]

Chim said:

davepoth said:

Let me put it another way. The person who owns around 75% of the shop asks you what you think of it. You tell him. Then the manager decides to ban you from the shop without checking with the owner.

Wow, he OWNS 75% percent of RBS. Someone should let him know that.

I'll try it in small words.

What we were doing there was using a little story to explain the situation. You suggested that RBS were completely in the right to bin the guy for saying bad things. I suggested that it was a bit off, on account of the government (who asked him to write the report) owning three quarters (79% in fact) of RBS.

http://www.investors.rbs.com/investor-story-kpis/e...

[Wacky Racer]

RBS epitomises all that is wrong with the British banking industry.

It needs a shake up from the top down. Lloyds, Barclays they are all at it.

The people I feel sorry for are the counter staff who see their bosses with their noses in the trough, whilst the banks are still being fined millions for malpractices dating back years.......

[Foppo]

Nobody touches these mafia gangsters they are above the law.

Yes we are all in this together another joke.

[eldar]

Foppo said:

Nobody touches these mafia gangsters they are above the law.

Yes we are all in this together another joke.

Be fair, refunds for mis sold PPI insurance have been propping up the economy (and lawyers) for a few years now. Ever one is a winner.

[carinaman]

eldar said:

Be fair, refunds for mis sold PPI insurance have been propping up the economy (and lawyers) for a few years now. Ever one is a winner.

So the banks made record profits under Gordon Brown by peddling useless self enriching products and now those ill gotten gains are being redistributed to the suckers that bought those 'products'?

And the global economic crash meant the taxpayer had to bail out the peddlers of the useless financial 'products' and pick up the tab for the recalls for the rubbish they sold?

It's money recycling not dissimilar to what organised criminals do to try to scrub clean their takings.

[handpaper]

Actually, it could be argued that it's classically Keynsian - a surplus made during times of plenty disbursed as a stimulus in poorer economic conditions.

[Murph7355]

Chim said:

... if he thinks the business is that bad why the fook is he still banking there anyway.

This bit is a perfectly valid question.

A key reason our markets don't work properly, IMO, is that people are too lazy or dumb to move (I count myself in this number at times).

If more of us start moving when business treats us badly, things stand a better chance of changing. But we don't.

[Digga]

Symptomatic of the attitude of banks.

I've told this story before on PH; my own personal bank called me one day shortly after the onset of the GFC, on my mobile, out of the blue to ask whether I wanted my facility on my offset/open-plan type mortgage. I explained that my wife and I had deliberately overpaid and saw the cushion as a rainy day fund. Given the economic conditions at the time, we were not minded to surrender that comfort. I did ask what reduction in interest rate I might get in exchange for reducing the bank's risks - there was an awkward silence. I can't help but think they may well have bounced a few customers that way though.

Hats off to Tomlinson though. This was - as evidenced by RBS's behaviour - a poison chalice of a job, and he did it with integrity and dilligence.

Given what I gleaned during the GFC from first hand accounts from other business owners (some of whom lost their live's work) I am mildly disappointed that other banks - Barclays and HSBC for example - avoided criticism, because I know for a fact they deployed barely different tactics.

In fact, we shifted our own business banking from "a big bank" in 2006, precisely because we realised how the command structure had changed and also because we were deeply suspicious of their use of a firm to value properties who also ran their own commercial property empire, some of it bought out of distressed businesses. Cosy.

I have sympathy for those SMEs who did not shift - there was (no longer) a huge degree of trust and loyalty and the relationships had, up to the tick-box, "computer says yes/no" era, been very local or regional. Yes, I know what the small print said, but you could argue that about PPI clients too.

What is most disturbing is how long it took 'the establishment' (government, economists, big business, the media) to spot the problem. Only now is the damage apparent - see Kate Barker's recent article in the Sunday Times about how a major shortfall in housing supply - who feed the large numbers of small developments, as opposed to the smaller numbers of very large developments viable to big housebuilders - is the dearth of SME developers whose businesses were culled and who are no longer willing and/or able to re-establish their enterprises.

[Hol]

eldar said:

Foppo said:

Nobody touches these mafia gangsters they are above the law.

Yes we are all in this together another joke.

Be fair, refunds for mis sold PPI insurance have been propping up the economy (and lawyers) for a few years now. Ever one is a winner.

When you take the 'pub logic' and emotion out of the equation, the whole PPI thing was rather clever of the government.


As said above, it got money to the exact people whom the government knew would spend it and completely side-stepped the problems associated with loaning money to people who would not qualify.

The banks never challenged the decison in the courts - they just went along with it.

[Tycho]

REALIST123 said:

He's better off without them.

I moved my personal stuff from them earlier this year after almost thirty years. I wish I'd done it years ago.

Slightly OT but which bank can you go to who doesn't do this kind of crap? I'm with RBS but wouldn't know who to transfer to as they all seem to be in it together.

[valiant]

Murph7355 said:

Chim said:

... if he thinks the business is that bad why the fook is he still banking there anyway.

This bit is a perfectly valid question.

A key reason our markets don't work properly, IMO, is that people are too lazy or dumb to move (I count myself in this number at times).

If more of us start moving when business treats us badly, things stand a better chance of changing. But we don't.

Maybe because they are all as st as each other???

[Digga]

valiant said:

Murph7355 said:

Chim said:

... if he thinks the business is that bad why the fook is he still banking there anyway.

This bit is a perfectly valid question.

A key reason our markets don't work properly, IMO, is that people are too lazy or dumb to move (I count myself in this number at times).

If more of us start moving when business treats us badly, things stand a better chance of changing. But we don't.

Maybe because they are all as st as each other???

Certainly not enough 'good' banks to go around. You name a large, well known high street bank and I know a business that has been clobbered by them.

One practice the Panorama show failed to pick up on was that of invoice factoring/discounting. A lot of the firms I know who had overdraft limits arbitrarily cut were offered a top-up by these means. They paid a higher fee and also had to do far more admin - the banks would call any 30 days plus invoice delinquent and throw them back at the firm's own credit control to deal with, effectively doubling their work - and these schemes were almost designed to get as much as possible out of the businesses in as short a period as possible. Some firms survived despite this, but others will undoubtedly have been pushed over the edge.

Before anyone posts that overdrafts are repayable on demand and banks always do work pro-cyclically, I would say:

1. that misses the point
2. the banks did have some duty to allow businesses an umbrella for the post GFC rainy days
3. the overall picture is of a deliberate, concerted scrabble for cash and reduction of risk