Mark Addison

‼️18 years ago this week‼️ 🔹RBS was collapsing at the same time Fred Goodwin was reassuring investors - but what was happening behind the scenes at its Irish subsidiary, Ulster Bank? 🔹18 years on, some very serious questions remain unanswered. 🔹When did RBS Group Treasury first instruct Ulster Bank to reduce its Irish lending exposures? 🔹Were perfectly viable Irish SMEs, farmers, hoteliers & property owners identified for exit because RBS desperately needed to conserve liquidity and capital? 🔹Were collateral valuations manipulated to manufacture covenant breaches & trigger defaults? 🔹Were borrowers pushed into restructuring, insolvency or asset disposals to address the bank’s own financial difficulties? 🔹What happened to the interest-rate swaps that many contend were fraudulently sold to these customers? 🔹Were invalid break costs, undisclosed credit facilities & invalid derivative liabilities used to intensify financial pressure? 🔹Who authorised the transfer of loans and associated derivative claims, and were customers ever properly informed? 🔹Did RBS benefit from fees, distressed asset disposals, derivative close-outs or government-backed loss protection arising from these exposures? 🔹What did RBS Group Treasury, Ulster Bank’s board, its auditors and the regulators know & when? 🔹Shouldn’t the Irish Banking Inquiry have obtained & forensically examined the relevant treasury instructions, credit committee records, valuation files & derivatives documentation? 🔹How many innocent Irish businesses & families lost everything while the banking group responsible for their financial arrangements was being rescued by taxpayers? 🔹Have we ever properly investigated whether the financial distress of the bank was transferred onto unsuspecting customers & whether their alleged defaults were manufactured & accelerated by the bank itself? 🔹18 years later, the shareholders’ losses and taxpayers’ rescue costs are extensively documented. 🔹Where is the equivalent accounting for the businesses destroyed, homes lost, livelihoods extinguished & families devastated? 🔹 Again, did RBS’s access to taxpayer-backed loss protection under the UK Asset Protection Scheme create inappropriate or indeed dangerous financial incentives to classify Irish borrowers as impaired, restructure their loans or trigger defaults & were adequate safeguards in place to prevent banks from benefiting from customer distress they had themselves caused or aggravated? 🔹 If credible evidence existed that the RBS banking group’s financial pressures were being transferred onto unsuspecting Irish businesses & families through questionable valuations, manufactured defaults, invalid derivative liabilities or aggressive enforcement, why was decisive intervention not forthcoming? 🔹The evidence points to an abject failure to act on what was known and/or a conscious decision to acquiesce by Irish civil servants, politicians & regulators. 🔹 A transfer of banking losses onto private citizens on such a scale should have required explicit legal authority, transparent accounting, democratic consent & rigorous parliamentary scrutiny. 🔹Instead, were thousands of individual borrowers left to fight complex, expensive & often ruinous legal battles without ever being told that their financial destruction might actually have formed part of a much wider banking restructuring? 🔹Which law firms had “authority” to enforce & what role did certain judges play by bellowing out: “You borrowed the money!” while simultaneously ignoring documentary evidence? 🔹What exactly did Irish Ministers, senior civil servants & regulators know? When did they know it? And why was the possibility of such a transfer of losses not openly investigated? 🔹If this was, in substance, a covert bail-in, who authorised it, who facilitated it, who benefited & why was the Oireachtas never asked to scrutinise it as such? @Wftproof @stevemiddi1 @kenoflynnTD @Ian_Fraser @andyverity

An extraordinary result after years of tenacious journalism by Andy Verity. Journalism like this matters precisely because Andy refused to let the story disappear. Congratulations @andyverity Persistence matters and evidence matters. And sometimes the truth takes an unforgivably long time to catch up with those who kept insisting it be heard. I highly recommend Rigged by Andy Verity as it helped to shed some light on my own treatment in the Irish Banking Inquiry. @EverettStern1 @Wftproof @stevemiddi1