Catastrophe de 45 milliards de dollars : comment Fred Goodwin a tué RBS en 18 mois

Transcription originale en anglais. Titres, résumés et FAQ traduits. Narration complète disponible via les sous-titres YouTube dans votre langue.

Dans la matinée du sept octobre deux mille huit, le président de la Royal Bank of Scotland a téléphoné au chancelier du Royaume-Uni et lui a annoncé que la banque serait à court d'argent en début d'après-midi. Les distributeurs automatiques de billets à travers la Grande-Bretagne étaient sur le point de devenir sombres dans des heures.

C'est ainsi qu'un comptable de Paisley a bâti la plus grande banque du monde, puis l'a mise en faillite en dix-huit mois. Comment une OPA hostile, un titre de chevalier, un jet privé et le refus de consulter deux dossiers à levier ont coûté dix milliards et demi de livres au contribuable britannique. Et comment l’homme au centre de tout cela a conservé sa pension.

In September two thousand and seven, the Royal Bank of Scotland was the fifth-largest bank on Earth. Its balance sheet was two point four trillion pounds, larger than the entire economy of the United Kingdom. Its chief executive, Sir Fred Goodwin, had been knighted by the Queen for services to banking three years earlier. Eighteen months later, the British government owned eighty-four percent of the company. Forty-five and a half billion pounds of public money kept it alive. The bank reported the largest annual loss in British corporate history. Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs. And Fred Goodwin walked away with a pension of seven hundred and three thousand pounds a year, payable from age fifty.

Frederick Anderson Goodwin was born on the seventeenth of August nineteen fifty-eight, in Paisley, on the outskirts of Glasgow. His father was an electrician. His mother was a school cook. He went to a local comprehensive school, studied law at the University of Glasgow, and in nineteen eighty-three he qualified as a chartered accountant at the firm Touche Ross. Five years later he made partner. He was thirty.

The work that built his reputation was unglamorous. Touche Ross hired him to lead the global wind-down of the collapsed bank BCCI — Bank of Credit and Commerce International — at the time the largest fraud investigation in banking history. He spent five years counting what was left after the lights went out. He was meticulous. He was rapid. He was unsentimental.

In nineteen ninety-five Clydesdale Bank invited him to become its deputy chief executive. Inside a year he was running both Clydesdale and Yorkshire Bank for their parent company, National Australia Bank. He closed branches. He fired staff in entire regions at a time. The trade press gave him a nickname. Fred the Shred. He hated it. He kept it.

In nineteen ninety-eight Sir George Mathewson, the chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland, brought Goodwin to Edinburgh as his deputy. RBS was then a respectable mid-sized Scottish bank, two hundred and seventy years old, founded by Royal Charter in seventeen twenty-seven. Its ambitions were modest. Mathewson's were not.

In February two thousand, the Royal Bank of Scotland completed a hostile takeover of National Westminster Bank, three times its own size. The deal closed at around twenty-one billion pounds. It was, at the time, the largest banking takeover in British history. The City had bet on Bank of Scotland to win. RBS won. Goodwin ran the integration. He delivered cost cuts ahead of schedule. In January two thousand and one, at the age of forty-two, he was promoted to chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

For the next six years, RBS was the fastest-growing bank in the world.

Between two thousand and one and two thousand and seven, Fred Goodwin executed at least twenty-six acquisitions. He bought Citizens Bank in the United States. He bought Charter One. He took a five percent stake in Bank of China. He moved into Ireland, Germany, Spain. He bought insurers. He bought airline-leasing companies. The balance sheet roughly quintupled. By the end of two thousand and seven the bank's total assets stood at two point four trillion pounds.

To understand that number — it was larger than the entire annual output of the United Kingdom economy. One bank, headquartered in Edinburgh, was carrying obligations larger than the country it lived in.

The share price followed the assets up. RBS stock peaked above six thousand pence in early two thousand and seven — over sixty pounds per share. Pre-tax profit for two thousand and six was nine point two billion pounds, the second-highest in the history of any British company. The workforce reached two hundred and twenty-six thousand people across more than fifty countries.

The new headquarters told the rest of the story. In two thousand and five the Queen opened RBS's new corporate campus at Gogarburn, on the western edge of Edinburgh — three hundred and fifty acres, three hundred and fifty thousand pounds spent on the wine cellar, a private chef, a personal scallop chef on standby, and a corporate jet on permanent call at Edinburgh airport. In June two thousand and four, Fred Goodwin was knighted by the Queen for services to banking. The newspapers called him the most powerful businessman in Scotland.

Nobody asked, in public, what the bank actually did.

In March two thousand and seven, a Dutch bank called ABN AMRO put itself up for sale. ABN AMRO was a sprawling, awkward institution — Dutch retail at home, investment banking in London, retail networks in Brazil and Italy, a wholesale business stuffed with American mortgages it had been quietly trying to offload for two years. Barclays moved first, announcing on the twenty-third of April a sixty-seven billion euro deal in shares.

Six weeks later, on the twenty-ninth of May two thousand and seven, Fred Goodwin walked into a press conference in Edinburgh and announced a rival offer. Seventy-one point one billion euros. In cash. Roughly ninety-six billion dollars. The largest banking takeover in history.

The bid was not from RBS alone. It was a three-way consortium — Royal Bank of Scotland, the Belgian-Dutch group Fortis, and Banco Santander of Spain. They would carve up ABN AMRO between them. RBS would take the wholesale division and the Asian operations. Fortis would take Dutch and Belgian retail. Santander would take Brazil and Italy.

The Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank had begun warning about systemic risk in American subprime mortgages two months earlier. On the ninth of August, while the bid was still being finalised, the French bank BNP Paribas froze three of its funds, citing the complete evaporation of liquidity in the American mortgage market. The credit crunch had officially begun. The consortium pressed on.

Goodwin did not perform meaningful due diligence on the assets RBS was buying. The internal record was later summarised, in evidence to the Financial Services Authority, as two lever-arch folders and a compact disc. The price for RBS's share alone was around ten billion pounds. The deal completed on the seventeenth of October two thousand and seven — eight weeks after the credit crunch had begun.

Inside the wholesale division RBS had just paid ten billion pounds for, there sat a portfolio of American subprime mortgages and collateralised debt obligations whose true value, in the autumn of two thousand and seven, was already collapsing.

By the spring of two thousand and eight the hole was visible from the outside. In April RBS announced a twelve billion pound rights issue — at the time the largest in United Kingdom history — to plug the subprime losses on its books. It was sold to pension funds and small investors as a precaution. It was, in fact, a rescue.

On the fifteenth of September two thousand and eight, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in New York. Within forty-eight hours, the wholesale funding markets — the overnight loans on which RBS depended to fund its trillion-pound balance sheet — seized up completely.

On the morning of Tuesday the seventh of October two thousand and eight, Fred Goodwin delivered a presentation to investors in London. By the time he finished speaking, the RBS share price had fallen thirty-five percent in a single session. That afternoon, the chairman of RBS, Sir Tom McKillop, telephoned the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, who was sitting in a finance ministers' meeting in Luxembourg. Darling asked him how long the bank could last. McKillop answered: "Well, we're going to run out of money in the early afternoon." Darling later described it as probably the most frightening moment of the entire financial crisis.

Cashpoints belonging to RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank served roughly a quarter of British retail banking customers. If RBS had failed before the end of trading that day, those machines would have stopped dispensing cash that night. Wages would not have cleared. Direct debits would not have moved. The chain reaction across the British high street would have started inside twelve hours.

Goodwin resisted a state rescue overnight. By the early hours of the eighth of October, he had agreed. On the morning of the eighth, the Treasury announced twenty-five billion pounds of capital available to British banks; twenty billion of it was earmarked for RBS. On Monday the thirteenth of October, Prime Minister Gordon Brown formally announced a fifty-billion-pound bank rescue package. RBS would receive an initial twenty billion that afternoon. The government would take a fifty-eight percent stake immediately. Over the following months, as further losses emerged, the stake rose to eighty-four percent. The same afternoon, Fred Goodwin's resignation as chief executive was announced. He left the building permanently on the first of January two thousand and nine.

On the twenty-sixth of February two thousand and nine, RBS reported its results for the previous year. The pre-tax loss was twenty-four point one billion pounds. It was, and it remains, the largest annual loss in British corporate history. Sixteen point eight billion of it was goodwill written off from the ABN AMRO acquisition — the bank was formally admitting that the deal it had paid ten billion pounds for, eighteen months earlier, was worth nothing.

Two days after the loss was announced, the British press discovered something else. Sir Fred Goodwin had walked out of RBS with a pension of seven hundred and three thousand pounds per year, payable from the age of fifty. He was fifty.

The reaction was incandescent. The Prime Minister said publicly that he was "shocked". The Chancellor demanded the pension be reduced. A protest group called Bank Bosses Are Criminals smashed the windows of Goodwin's Edinburgh home and damaged his car. He moved his family out of the country for several months. Under sustained political pressure, on the eighteenth of June two thousand and nine, Goodwin agreed to take a reduced pension of three hundred and forty-two thousand five hundred pounds per year. With inflation linking, in two thousand and twenty-four it was reported to stand at roughly six hundred thousand pounds per year. He still receives it.

On the first of February two thousand and twelve, the Honours Forfeiture Committee recommended, and the Queen formally cancelled and annulled, Fred Goodwin's knighthood. He was the first banker stripped of one in modern British history.

The Financial Services Authority opened a board-level review of the collapse. Its report, published in December two thousand and eleven, ran to four hundred and fifty-two pages. It found multiple failures of leadership and judgement at the top of RBS. It also found that no individual at the bank had broken any specific banking regulation. The FSA took no formal enforcement action against Fred Goodwin. Only one RBS director — Johnny Cameron, the former chairman of Global Banking Markets — was sanctioned, and only by being barred from holding a significant influence function at a bank again. Goodwin himself was never charged with any criminal offence.

His successor, Stephen Hester, spent five years dismantling what Goodwin had built. He sold non-core businesses. He shrank the balance sheet by around seven hundred and twenty billion pounds. He cut nearly forty thousand jobs. He never recovered the shareholder value.

In two thousand and seventeen, a group of nine thousand investors who had bought into the April two thousand and eight rights issue brought RBS to the High Court. The case was the last opportunity to put Fred Goodwin in a witness box, under oath, to answer for the collapse. On the day the trial was due to begin, the bank settled for around two hundred million pounds. Goodwin never testified. He has not given a public interview since.

In two thousand and twenty the rebrand was complete. The Royal Bank of Scotland Group plc renamed itself NatWest Group. The blue and gold daisy logo that had stood on Edinburgh's Princes Street for two and a half centuries was retired from the holding company. Only the Scottish retail branches still carried the RBS name.

On the thirtieth of May two thousand and twenty-five — seventeen years after Sir Tom McKillop's phone call to the Chancellor — His Majesty's Treasury sold the last sliver of taxpayer-owned NatWest shares. The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, called it the turning of a page. The press release was careful, and clinical. After all the share sales, all the dividends, all the asset-protection fees, the total recovered by the British state was just under thirty-five billion pounds.

The total invested had been forty-five and a half billion.

The crystallised loss to the British public was ten and a half billion pounds — roughly one hundred and fifty pounds for every taxpaying adult in the United Kingdom. That is the public cost, on the official Treasury arithmetic, of one bank's decision in October two thousand and seven to spend ten billion pounds on a Dutch portfolio it had not read.

Fred Goodwin is now sixty-six years old. He lives quietly in Edinburgh. He has not run a public company since. He still draws his pension, every month, on time, for life.