It's been a bad day for the bankers - a bad year, in fact. Following on from publication of a highly critical report on the corporate culture at Barclays by lawyer-turned-investment banker Anthony Salz, and ahead of the report to be published by the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, a group of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) shareholders have filed a $4bn lawsuit against the bank, claiming they were misled into thinking the bank was in good shape just prior to its collapse. The subsequent government bailout of RBS diluted the holdings of existing shareholders and the share price went into freefall, slashing the value of the claimants' holdings. The bank is currently 82 per cent owned by the UK government.
The RBoS Action Group is now claiming that former directors were personally responsible for convincing shareholders to part with around £12bn in the bank's 2008 rights issue, which was concluded only a matter of months before the bank's corporate model unravelled. Aside from the bank's controversial former chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin, the named defendants in the claim are Sir Tom McKillop, former chairman, Johnny Cameron, the previous boss of RBS's investment banking arm, and Guy Whittaker, who was the bank's finance director.
