Britannia Radio

Minister with his own RBS pension slips from select committee’s grasp

Lord Myners, the Minister for the City who claims he was not fully informed about the controversial £700,000-a-year pension for RBS chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin, has escaped a grilling by the Commons Treasury Select Committee because the Treasury has put forward Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, to answer questions himself.

The Treasury move has frustrated some MPs on the committee, who feel that Lord Myners has got plenty of questions to answer after they discovered that the former banker also has a pension worth £100,000-a-year from his time as a director of NatWest, which RBS bought in 2000.

Lord Myners has insisted he was not aware that Goodwin's huge pension pay-out at 50 years of age was discretionary and could have been stopped during crisis talks he conducted between midnight and 3am one morning last October when the Government agreed to bail out the RBS bank to prevent it going bust.

Had Goodwin's bank been allowed to go bankrupt, he would have qualified for an annual pension under the state pension protection scheme of around £22,000. Instead he walked away with a £16m package that the Government is now seeking to claw back, and Myners is being blamed for lacking the political nous to stop it.

However, senior members of the Treasury committee say that Myners must have had an intimate knowledge of the pension arrangements for the bank, as he was a beneficiary himself. He was chief executive of the investment outfit Gartmore when it was bought by NatWest in 1996 and, three years later, he was granted a pension worth £99,800 a year at 60, his current age.

"We would really like to question Lord Myners about his pension," one member of the Treasury committee told the Mole, "but we've been told that Alistair Darling is going to answer the questions instead. We have overbid for witnesses."

Perhaps Lord Myners will offer himself up for questioning to iron out these points before the committee compiles its report which is bound to be highly critical of all involved in the banking rescue later this month.

The curse of Sir Fred continues to haunt Government ministers. HaplessHarriet Harman damaged her leadership ambitions by having to issue a correction after saying at PMQs that Sir Fred's knighthood was granted for his charity work for the Prince's Trust, and had nothing to do with banking. In fact, it was granted by the Queen for services to banking.

Gordon Brown may have difficulty saying sorry, but perhaps Harriet could still steal a march on him by emulating Barack Obama and saying: "I screwed up."

THE MOLE: GOODWIN FALLOUT

FIRST POSTED MARCH 5, 2009

The Mole on Brown's visit to Washington