When I wrote in July that Dame Alison Rose’s forced exit as chief executive of NatWest in the wake of the Nigel Farage scandal was ‘unnecessary’, many readers vehemently disagreed with me. Out she went, Treasury ministers having steamrollered the NatWest board’s brief attempt to hold her in post – and a subsequent Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) report concluded she had breached data protection laws by revealing to the BBC that Farage had been a customer of the Coutts arm of NatWest and adding the misleading suggestion that his accounts had been closed for purely commercial reasons.
Bang to rights, then. Rose should forfeit the £10 million to which she’s contractually entitled and I should execute a swift reverse-ferret. Or should we? An internal report for NatWest by the law firm Travers Smith gave a different slant both on Rose’s dinner chat with the BBC’s Simon Jack and her underlings’ ‘exit decision’ on Farage – which the lawyers concluded was ‘predominantly commercial’ rather than political and ‘made in accordance with the relevant bank policies’, but not correctly communicated to Farage.
As for Rose, says Travers Smith, she had not seen the controversial 40-page report to NatWest’s reputational risk committee – highlighting his alleged non-alignment with the bank’s ‘Purpose’ – that preceded the exit decision. And she did not consciously set out to make inappropriate disclosures, because she ‘honestly, but incorrectly’ believed Farage had already outed himself as a Coutts customer. Her real fault was that ‘she did not check the position before starting a risky conversation with a journalist’.
Farage says Travers Smith has produced a ‘complete and utter whitewash’ – but his ire has been directed chiefly at its account of the exit decision, with only a sideswipe at ‘the culture created by Alison Rose’.
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