So just what do you have to do to get fired around here? At Royal Bank of Scotland, gross moral turpitude and some energetic expense fiddling might just do it. Apparently, the worst loss in British banking history may not.
Sir Tom McKillop will stand up as chairman of RBS today to announce a loss of as much as £1.7 billion. He will, we can assume, attempt to justify last summer's €10 billion purchase of ABN Amro. Bad timing, couldn't see it coming, huge opportunities still, you can probably write the script.
RBS is a curious beast. Until the purchase of NatWest in 2000, its word went unchallenged in the incestuous Scottish establishment. You can bet that if anyone on an Edinburgh newspaper wrote in the above terms, the matter would be raised on the golf course with the writer's editor and his or her career would take an abrupt
detour.
As I don't have an editor, nor even a job, I can say that it is passing strange that nobody seems to be blamed for this disaster. And, as I have already pointed out, some of the scions of the Scottish establishment do not think it is a disaster.
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