Sir Fred Goodwin, Ex-RBS Boss, Could Be Stripped Of His Knighthood This Week

Sir Fred Goodwin Could Lose Knighthood This Week

Former RBS boss Sir Fred Goodwin could discover whether he gets to keep his knighthood within days, David Cameron has revealed.

Speaking during Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday, Cameron said the The Honours Forfeiture Committee will meet this week to discuss whether Sir Fred should hold on to his title, which he received in 2004 for services to banking.

"It will be considering all of the evidence including, as I have said before, the Financial Services Authority report into RBS and what went wrong and who was responsible," he told MPs.

The prime minister has said he is "sympathetic" to the calls for him to lose his title, as has deputy prime minister Nick Clegg.

Labour leader Ed Miliband has acknowledged that it was "clearly wrong" for the banker to have received a knighthood under the previous Labour government.

Calls for Sir Fred to be stripped of his title have been led by Tory MP Matt Hancock, a close ally of George Osborne, who tabled a Commons motion calling the knighthood "perverse and unacceptable" as he was "largely responsible" for the biggest failure in banking history.

Sir Fred Goodwin's period in charge of RBS ended in disaster when the bank had to bailed out by the taxpayer following the financial crisis of 2008.

According to officials the Honours Forfeiture Committee would normally only consider cases only where an individual has been jailed for more than three months or has been struck off or censured by a professional body for failings relevant to the granting of the honour.

Royal Bank of Scotland is also coming under pressure from the government to halve the bonus awarded to current chief executive, Stephen Hester.

The Treasury is expected to tell bosses at the majority taxpayer-owned bank that Hester should receive no more than £1 million this year.

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