"De-Banking" Not A Political Problem Says FCA – Media

Tom Burroughes

14 October 2023

The UK financial regulator says it has found no evidence that politicians are being denied bank accounts or rejected from existing ones because of their views, a report said.

The findings come from the , part of NatWest Group, shut an account of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage. (The UK government owns 40 per cent of NatWest after that bank, formerly known as Royal Bank of Scotland, was bailed out in 2008.) The saga also revealed that a number of other figures with ties to the political world, including Dominic Lawson, the son of the late UK Thatcher administration cabinet minister Nigel Lawson, had struggled to open bank accounts. Even the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, revealed that he had been refused an account. In another case, anti-Brexit campaigner and City figure Gina Miller had an account shut down.

Yesterday's Daily Telegraph reported that the FCA said it had not examined the Farage case.

The Farage episode and others raised fears that people in banks, perhaps motivated by political bias or contemporary cultural ideas, are shutting accounts of people they dislike, or are over-zealously enforcing controls on “politically exposed persons.”

“This is an absolute farce. There are so many people who have been de-banked for political reasons, because their views don’t align or because they are PEPs,” Bloomberg quoted Farage as saying.

(Editor’s note: I have already given my own views on this case, and others.)