A BOOK about disgraced banker Fred Goodwin depicts him as a man obsessed with day-to-day detail rather than the big financial issues of the day.
Nicknamed "Fred the Shred" for his habit of dressing down executives, Goodwin developed a reputation as an aggressive chief executive of the Clydesdale Bank, and later the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).
Making It Happen by Iain Martin reveals an incident where a Clydesdale district manager was pulled up by Goodwin in front of fellow executives at an away-day about moving a statue in one of the bank's Aberdeen branches.
"He went absolutely mental," said an employee at the time.
Martin also claims Goodwin was fixated with the cleanliness of branches, ordering a mass tidy up across the Clydesdale group and making personal surprise inspections.
Martin says: "Goodwin complained there was too much paper lying about piled up in front of customers, or in the strongroom at the back where old ledgers were stored.
"He had a particular hatred of any public use of Sellotape. If he spotted a Sellotaped notice in a branch a sharp rebuke followed."
In the middle of a meeting with one executive, Goodwin took a call from his mother who had been walking past his head office in Glasgow.
She had noticed a cigarette butt on the steps outside and Goodwin immediately phoned a senior executive asking for it to be removed.
His quest for cleanliness took him to photograph the outside of branches, which on one occasion aroused the suspicions of a local policeman in Bridge of Weir, Renfrewshire, the book claims
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