Questions that need to be asked on RBS

WHILE sympathising with RBS shareholders who wish to settle out of court, I agree that Alan Fitzpatrick’s questions need credible answers (Letters, May 26).

When taxpayers have bailed out RBS (and its directors) for £46 billion and it remains in public ownership; when its “profits” reported from 2000-2007 proved to be bogus; when its directors and top executives retain their phone-number bonuses based on such bogus numbers; when after nine years its losses continue, totalling around £60bn; when the directors and executives were permitted by Lord Myners, appointed by Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling as the responsible government minister, to swan off into the sunset with massive pension “entitlements” effectively paid by us (in Fred Goodwin’s case £713,000 per annum for life from age 50) rather than capped at the limit of £27,000 applying to any other bankrupt firm; when little light was generated by Mr Goodwin and ex-chairman Sir Tom McKillop at the only public hearing to date (at the televised Treasury Select Committee in February 2009); when Archie Hunter CA, then the RBS audit and remuneration chairman, has not been required to confirm publicly that he fully supported the Rights Issue Prospectus and fully understood what Mr Goodwin was doing (such as with complex instruments of debt consolidation and collateralisation, which Sir Tom admitted he did not); and when the Dutch regulatory authority has not explained its lax oversight of ABN Amro Bank whose acquisition by the RBS-led consortium caused RBS’s downfall – serious questions remain to which the public is entitled to credible answers and which can be answered satisfactorily only in court.