SIR Fred Goodwin's lawyers succeeded in removing a claim he did not have the experience to run a global bank from an official report on the Royal Bank of Scotland's collapse, it emerged yesterday.

The former chief's legal team requested the changes to a report by the Financial Services Authority (FSA), into the £45billion taxpayers' bailout of the bank in 2008.

The revelation comes as political pressure mounted on the UK Government to strip Sir Fred of his knighthood. Separately, as revealed in The Herald on Saturday, he is facing the possible loss of his fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Details of the FSA amendments were made public by City lawyer Bill Knight at a meeting of the House of Commons Treasury Committee yesterday.

He said Sir Fred's lawyers were allowed to request changes to the document, months before its publication in December, under a process known as "Maxwellisation".

Mr Knight told MPs: "It is true that the references to Sir Fred were changed following Maxwellisation. But in my judgment that was fair.

"The change was that there was a suggestion he lacked the experience to run an international bank."

Mr Knight said this was viewed as an attack on Sir Fred's competence but "there was no evidence of incompetence".

Maxwellisation is so called because it was used in the investigation into pension fund abuse by newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell in the 1990s.

Edinburgh-based RBS is now 82% owned by the taxpayer following the bailout during the financial crisis. Its shares are worth 46% less than the Government paid for them, closing at 27.05p last night.

Sir Fred, who ran Clydesdale Bank before joining RBS, could be stripped of his knighthood after it was referred to the Honours Forfeiture Committee.

The Royal Society's governing council will discuss stripping Sir Fred of his fellowship at its next meeting on February 20.

Under the honours system, recipients can be made to hand back an award if they are "censured by the relevant regulatory authority for actions which are directly relevant to the granting of an honour".

Yet the two experts who oversaw the FSA report were unable to agree whether it actually censured Sir Fred.

Mr Knight told the Treasury committee: "I would hesitate to find a passage in that report that amounted to specific censure of Sir Fred."

But his colleague, former banker Sir David Walker, said: "There is an accumulation of poor decisions that were poor by the standards of the day and it is very hard to see how this cannot in any sense be a censure of the chief executive who was pivotal in virtually every decision that was taken."

Sir David said the FSA could have blocked the now infamous £49bn takeover of Dutch bank ABN Amro, led by RBS in 2007, if it had intervened early in the process and signalled it would insist on higher capital standards.

"We are very clear that not to have stood in the way of this with hindsight was wrong," he said. But he noted that the take-over was backed by 95.5% of RBS investors.

Sir David added that Barclays had been fortunate to have lost the bid battle for ABN Amro.

"They were certainly lucky," he said. "The only hesitation I have is that sometimes good luck is what you position yourself for. I think they had done the arithmetic."

Sir David said he thought future hostile takeovers are unlikely in the banking sector because it makes it hard to do due diligence. The FSA report found that RBS's due diligence on ABN Amro amounted to "two lever arch files and a CD".

Both Sir David and Mr Knight told the committee a similar inquiry into the collapse of HBOS should be conducted.

Meanwhile, campaign group Avaaz claimed to have attracted 90,000 signatories to a petition calling on the Government to block bonus payments at RBS.