Northern Rock, once the fifth largest mortgage lender in the nation and now the bank known as the victim of the first run on a British bank in nearly 150 years, is to reveal costs and figures relating to its rescue over the coming week.
The bank is to reveal its results since its collapse last year and its subsequent rescue by the government at the expense of the taxpayer.
The reports will include any pay offs to directors, as well as possible details of its future business plan. The figures are due to be released at the start of April.
The promise to reveal all of these figures, including the true amount borrowed from the Bank of England, was made by the new chief executive of the Rock, Ron Sandler, who was appointed by the government when the bank passed into public ownership.
Sandler has already commented that the amount borrowed from the central bank was along the lines of £25 billion, but this report will put a firm figure on what was borrowed when the bank became one of the country’s highest profile victims of the credit crunch.
The Financial Services Authority recently revealed that it had failed Northern Rock during the crisis by failing to identify or deal with the issues facing the lender.
With regards to the FSA admission an official from the British Banker’s Association stated: ‘Numbers of regulators do not matter - what matters is the calibre of the people. There are two ways we can improve that.
One is secondment, the other is that there are senior people who have plenty of top-level banking experience who do not want to work in that field directly. They often go to work for charities or quangos. We need to make the FSA one of the quangos they go to work for.’
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