The Royal Bank of Scotland plc

The Royal Bank of Scotland's Global Restructuring Group sat at a difficult boundary. It dealt with businesses in financial distress while the bank itself was recovering from crisis, protecting capital and reducing risky exposures. Those legitimate objectives did not remove the duty to treat customers appropriately. The official record found widespread inappropriate treatment in a significant proportion of reviewed cases, weak communication, income-generation pressure and governance failures, while rejecting the claim that there was a general practice of deliberately engineering viable businesses into distress for profit. The accountability test is whether a recovery unit can prove that transfer, pricing, valuation, asset acquisition, complaint and exit decisions serve a defensible turnaround purpose.