FSA: Beef up EU rules after RBS
THE UK must vigorously oppose Europe’s stance on new capital rules in the wake of RBS’s collapse, FSA chairman Lord Adair Turner said yesterday.
The long-awaited report into the bank’s 2008 bail-out by taxpayers published yesterday said that regulators were using a “fundamentally flawed” set of rules for how much a bank must put aside in reserves.
As part of its response to the collapse of RBS under the leadership of Sir Fred Goodwin (pictured), the FSA wants the UK to introduce its own, hyper-strict capital regime. But Europe wants all states to have the same capital rules, one of the major flashpoints leading to David Cameron’s veto of the EU treaty on Friday, as he told parliament yesterday.
“There is a debate going on with different points of view,” said Turner. And he even suggested that Britain look at the example of other states that are simply ignoring the EU’s stance.
“Some other countries are just getting on with it and putting facts on the ground – the Dutch, the Irish, the Swedes… This is an argument we can win,” he said. But he claimed that he didn’t think Cameron’s use of a veto had made a difference.
In response to RBS’s collapse, the FSA and Bank of England want to goldplate Brussels rules on capital. “The bigger the capital rules the less we need an army of people checking the details,” Turner said yesterday.