The board of NatWest Group Plc said Chief Executive Officer Alison Rose still has their support after she admitted speaking to a BBC journalist about the decision to close Nigel Farage’s bank account.
(Bloomberg) — The board of NatWest Group Plc said Chief Executive Officer Alison Rose still has their support after she admitted speaking to a BBC journalist about the decision to close Nigel Farage’s bank account.
“As she recognises, she should not have spoken in the way she did,” Chairman Howard Davies said in a statement Tuesday. “This was a regrettable error of judgement on her part.”
Still, she retains the full confidence of the board, Davies said, while noting her behavior would “be taken into account in decisions on remuneration at the appropriate time.”
Rose said in a statement that she told BBC journalist Simon Jack at a dinner that the bank saw the move to close Farage’s account as a commercial one. At the time, she hadn’t seen internal documents from NatWest’s subsidiary Coutts, she said. Those documents have since been released by Farage, showing Coutts felt his values did not align with its own.
She emphasized that she wasn’t part of the decision-making process to exit Farage and said she didn’t “reveal any personal financial information” about him.
“Put simply, I was wrong to respond to any question raised by the BBC about this case,” she said. “I want to extend my sincere apologies to Mr Farage for the personal hurt this has caused him and I have written to him today.”
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