LONDON: Royal Bank of Scotland executives "misled" a parliamentary committee over the extent to which the bank mistreated small businesses during and after the financial crisis, a lawmaker said in Britain's parliament on Tuesday.
State-owned RBS's chief executive and chairman misled the Treasury Select Committee while giving evidence on the bank's conduct last week, Clive Lewis, of the opposition Labour party, said, referring to a full version of a report into the matter that has not yet been made public.
"Having read the document I believe it shows that RBS executives misled the Treasury Select Committee in their evidence and had a stated policy of misleading members of this house," Lewis, who is an opposition spokesman on Treasury matters, said.
"Far from being isolated incidents of poor governance as they claimed to the committee, this report explicitly states their behavior was, quote, 'systemic and widespread'."
RBS declined to comment.
The report looked into the conduct of the bank's Global Restructuring Group, which handled over 12,000 struggling firms between 2007 and 2012 and is accused by some of purposely pushing them into bankruptcy to pick up their assets on the cheap.
The scandal has dogged RBS's attempts to reform its image a decade on from the financial crisis. The bank accepts some wrongdoing but disputes the most serious allegations against it.
The Treasury Select Committee has also butted heads with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) over the publication of the full report into the unit's behaviour. The regulator, which commissioned the report, had until recently refused to publish its full contents and instead released a detailed summary.
The summary has been confirmed as an accurate reflection of the report's full contents by a committee-appointed barrister, but Lewis said it represented a "sanitised version".
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