Receive free Nigel Farage updates
We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Nigel Farage news every morning.
Nigel Farage, the former Brexit party leader, has revealed that Coutts has offered to allow him to keep his accounts at the bank, in what would amount to a full climbdown by the embattled institution.
Farage is in talks with Coutts on the issue but said he still wanted to know the full truth of why the bank decided to close down his accounts in the first place.
He said on his GB News show on Monday night that Coutts, a private bank owned by NatWest, was prepared to reverse its original decision on “debanking” him.
“The new chief executive of Coutts, Mo Syed, somebody who has held very senior positions within that bank, is now the boss and he has written to me to say I can keep both my personal and my business accounts,” Farage said. “That’s good and I thank him for it.”
Farage added that the fight to find out why he was being thrown out of Coutts had taken up a lot of his time and cost a lot in legal fees and that he wanted that money back.
He said: “I have today sent a legal litigation letter to Coutts where I want some full apologies, I want some compensation for my costs but — more important than all of that — I want a face-to-face meeting with the bank’s bosses.”
Farage told the Financial Times: “I want the truth to make sure no NatWest customer ever goes through this again.”
Farage has launched a website that he says will allow him to champion the causes of other people who have been denied bank accounts, broadening his campaign to other institutions.
Coutts’s chief executive Peter Flavel stepped down last week, saying he bore “ultimate” responsibility for the treatment of Farage. A memo obtained by the former politician showed that the institution once known as the “Queen’s bank” had closed his account in part because of his political views.
“In the handling of Mr Farage’s case we have fallen below the bank’s high standards of personal service,” Flavel said on Thursday.
NatWest announced that Syed would be appointed interim chief executive of Coutts and NatWest’s wider wealth division on Thursday. He joined Coutts as head of asset management in 2012, after previous terms at companies including the Bank of Tokyo, Barclays and Axiom Funds Group.
Alison Rose, chief executive of Coutts’s owner NatWest, also resigned last week. Her departure early on Wednesday morning came hours after admitting she was the source of an inaccurate briefing to the BBC that suggested commercial logic was the only reason behind Farage’s account closure.
The bank’s board backed Rose on Tuesday evening but changed position early the next morning, at which point political pressure had made her position “untenable”, chair Howard Davies said on Friday.
Shares in the high street lender are down almost 10 per cent since the start of the year, with the upside from rising rates hit by the political scandal and industry-wide fallout from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and other lenders in America and Europe.
Coutts did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
