Coutts: the laughs keep coming

Readers who enjoyed Thursday’s Coutts bank story will be keen for the next instalment.

Well, the folk running the bank have finally stirred from their torpor and issued a well-lawyered apology to the debanked Nigel Farage (a man whose career in some respects resembles that of our very own Winston Peters).

Who promptly released it to the media (which in some respects resembles the behaviour of our very own …).

It’s as well crafted as you would expect from London’s legal finest:

“I am writing to apologise for the deeply inappropriate comments about yourself …”

Well, naturally.

“ … it is absolutely not our policy to exit a customer on the basis of legally held political and personal views … “

Absolutely.

“… I fully understand yours [sic] and the public’s concern that the processes for bank account closure are not sufficiently transparent. Customers have a right to expect their bank to make consistent decisions against publicly available criteria and those decisions should be communicated clearly and openly with them, within the constraints imposed by the law …”

With a bit of luck, we might be able to hold the line on this.

“… To achieve this, sector wide change is required, but your experience, highlighted in recent days, has shown we also need to put our own processes under scrutiny too …”

And this is everyone’s problem, including, we hope, the government’s.

“I welcome the FCA’s reviews of regulatory rules associated with Politically Exposed Persons”

This is the source of the problem and it would be jolly helpful if something compromising involving you, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin emerged to help us with the stuff we’ve just apologised for.

A courageous approach you might think, particularly the holding back on any offers of compensation or reinstatement (although “alternative banking arrangements” were offered).

Will it be courageous enough to get ahead of events as they are developing?

It would appear that a flood of people are preparing to file the same Subject Access Requests used by Nigel Farage to access his debanking data (the Daily Telegraph sources a Facebook group claiming 10,000 sacked customers).

Meanwhile the BBC has issued a correction to its story on why Farage had been debanked, saying that what their “source said wasn’t accurate”,  but not beating themselves up too badly for promulgating fake news.

As it emerged that the evening before the BBC story appeared, the journalist responsible had enjoyed an agreeable dinner at which he sat next to the parent bank’s chief executive, Dame Alison Rose.

The optics are not good. 

Even the Guardian now thinks that “Nigel Farage has a point”.

One can only guess that the bank’s crisis managers think a not-terribly-handsome apology can deflect this case into a wider debate on over-zealous application of a slightly-flawed process.

But the public may not be as comfortable with the principle of businesses providing necessary services (particularly government-controlled ones) boycotting individuals because they have said some unpopular things or associated with some dubious characters (like the president of the United States).

Let’s see now how widespread the practices have been, and whether human sacrifices are required to expiate them.