ROGUE bankers should face jail for running risks with other people’s money, Gordon Brown has said as he warned not enough had changed since the financial crash.
The former prime minister said failure to get tough on dishonest bankers – with prison sentences, removal of bonuses and confiscation of assets – would give the “green light” to further bad behaviour.
Brown also revealed he had been prepared to quit if the UK Government’s multi-billion-pound bank bail-out package had failed to prevent a further collapse in the financial markets.
As prime minister at the time of the crash, and chancellor for a decade before that, Brown acknowledged he would have had to resign if the intervention on October 8, 2008 had failed, and he told his wife Sarah to be ready to leave Downing Street.
In his memoir My Life, Our Times, Brown warns “little has changed” since 2009 and that the banks deemed “too big to fail” are now even larger. Banks’ profits were at least in part the result of government safeguards which meant “the risks they are taking is often not with their money but with ours”.
Brown said “it cannot be right” that disgraced former RBS boss Fred Goodwin “walked away with all of his past bonuses untouched”.
He said under Goodwin “millions of pounds were simply wasted” by RBS, adding that “at no point did I ever hear Fred Goodwin express real contrition to me – or to anyone else – for his role in the bank’s collapse”.
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