Jail ‘Rogue Bankers’ Before They Cause Another Crash – Gordon Brown
Carol Adl
YourNewsWire.com
October 31, 2017
Former British Prime minister Gordon Brown has warned that “rogue bankers” will cause another financial crash.
He said that the failure to jail them after the last crisis means that it is now “inevitable” they will start gambling again with public money.
The former labour party leader said “If bankers who act fraudulently are not put in jail with their bonuses returned, assets confiscated and banned from future practice, we will only give a green light to similar risk-laden behaviour in new forms.”
The Telegraph reports:
Writing in his memoirs, which are published next week, the former Prime Minister warned the “mistakes of the past have not been heeded” and bankers who act fraudulently must be jailed, banned from future practice and their assets confiscated.
He questioned how Fred Goodwin, the former boss of RBS, could walk away with his past bonuses “untouched”, a tax-free lump sum of £5 million and a pension of £300,000 a year after the bank collapsed and was bailed out by the taxpayer.
But he said Mr Goodwin’s conduct was “typical” of UK banking a decade ago, which he summed up as the “shameful wasting of millions of pounds”, and also heavily criticised Barclays, Northern Rock and HBOS.
Querying why there were no criminal prosecutions, unlike in other countries, he said “little has changed” since the 2008 crisis other than that “the banks that were deemed‘too big to fail’ are now even bigger than they were.”
Mr Brown also recalled how Mr Goodwin showed “not a shred of contrition” when RBS was forced to go to the public purse for help and he had prepared to resign as Prime Minister if his government’s bank rescue plan had failed.
The former Labour leader unveiled a £500 billion scheme that saw the taxpayer take large stakes in major banks in return for funds to prop up their shattered balance sheets.
However, he also used the book, titled My Life, Our Times, to state that one of his largest regrets is not having time to push through fundamental reform of the banking system before he lost power in the 2010 general election.
Mr Brown said: “If bankers who act fraudulently are not put in jail with their bonuses returned, assets confiscated and banned from future practice, we will only give a green light to similar risk-laden behaviour in new forms.”
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