FCA and Andrew Bailey

This is cut and pasted from Tuesday 2nd February's Times:

"An apology by Andrew Bailey for the Financial Conduct Authority’s handling of the £237 million London Capital & Finance scandal was “not adequate” and the Bank of England and Treasury should consider censuring him, according to the author of an independent report into the affair.

Dame Elizabeth Gloster, the former Court of Appeal judge whose report revealed “significant gaps and weaknesses” at the FCA under Bailey’s leadership, told MPs that his apology had failed to “address the problem”, in which the City regulator did not intervene at LC&F before it was too late.

Bailey, who ran the FCA for four years before becoming governor of the Bank of England last March, responded to the damning report by saying he was sorry that reforms he had planned for the supervision of financial firms “did not come in time for LC&F bondholders”.

Gloster told the Treasury select committee that while Bailey had inherited problems at the FCA, they did not “excuse or mitigate the FCA’s overall failure to regulate LC&F during the period of his guardianship”.

“I don’t think [the apology] really addresses the problem because the [FCA] problems were not so fundamental they could not be fixed,” she said. “It is not an adequate reason or excuse.”

She told MPs that the FCA, the Treasury and the Bank of England should “consider [what] it is appropriate to do in the light of the serious criticisms and conclusions” in terms of consequences for Bailey and two others named in her report: Megan Butler, the former head of supervision, and Jonathan Davidson, outgoing executive director of supervision, retail and authorisations. LC&F raised more than £237 million by selling risky minibonds, a type of debt that was marketed to retail investors with the promise of paying high rates of interest. It collapsed into administration in January 2019 after the FCA finally intervened at the firm. Many buyers of the bonds were elderly and had put their life savings into the toxic instruments; they are expected to receive only 25 per cent of their money back from administrators.

Gloster’s report concluded that LC&F investors “were entitled to expect, and receive, more protection from the regulatory regime”, and revealed that the FCA had failed to act on a number of red flags.

Gloster said that a “braver woman” might have said she was “quite irritated or quite surprised” but “certainly disappointed” by attempts by named individuals, including Bailey, to deter her inquiry from identifying them.

“It was inappropriate in quite a serious way to try and suggest to me ... that their names shouldn’t be mentioned.”

She said the requests had been made by lawyers and accused the individuals of a “lack of judgment” by not advising their legal advisers that the request “wouldn’t go down very well with me”.

The FCA cancelled £205,000-worth of executive bonuses in the wake of the report but there are calls for those implicated to pay back bonuses awarded in previous years as well."

Now hold on. 

From your list of infamy I would like to reclaim Bondmason, Funding Empire, Landbay
What have you got against OLC, FK?

I don't know all of these, but yes there are also stinkers.

words fail me - 

A scapegoat is someone who is blamed for the faults of others. Surely the person in charge of a failing FCA for 4 years was the person at fault. 

I agree with almost everything in your post, but if the man at the top for 4 years didn't substantially improve the culture within the FCA, then he's been a large part of the problem in my book. 

Three words are obviously missing :-

"into the ground."