Last week, U.K. bank Royal Bank of Scotland revealed that it had made a profit for the first time in 10 years since its £45 billion (U.S.$63bn) government bailout at the height of the financial crisis. However, the £752 million (U.S.$1bn) profit it made for the past financial year is in stark contrast to the £58 billion (U.S.$80bn) it has lost in the past nine years as part of its restructure and is of little comfort to the thousands of distressed small-business owners that the bank—which is still 71-percent owned by the taxpayer—deliberately targeted by charging excessive fees to claw back cash.
The United Kingdom’s banking regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), first commissioned a report back in 2014 into RBS’ Global Restructuring Group (GRG), a specialist unit run within the bank to turnaround struggling small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), following allegations made by former clients from 2009 to 2010 that the bank was more intent on saving itself than the businesses it was ostensibly meant to turn around.
