The scrote doesn’t care that he has made a boat load of cash at the expense of thousands of others. He doesn’t care about the thousands of businesses that have gone under because of him and his mates. But when he is hit in the pockets by having to move to a pleb account, then we get questioned in parliament and a plethora of front page headlines about how hard he is done by. When is he ever going to live up to the threats of “I am going to have to leave the UK”.
I am generally in agreement that you should have a right to a degree of free speech without being impacted by things like bank restrictions; that said, he seems only to care in his instance. Private wealth clientele at almost every bank have traditionally been under a greater scrutiny due to the inherent risk of reputational damage they can inflict, and the standard for this has always gone UP for celebrities and politicians. The reason he hasn’t cared before is that most of these institutions are right-leaning if not right wing; they’ve therefore not used these rules on people to the right of the spectrum unless they were affiliates/members of a banned group. We should all be wondering how Nigel got so far right a bank full of hedge fund managers wanted to lose connection to him.
The thing I don’t understand is that if his politics was such an issue, why did they give him an account in the first place? He was a more prominent political figure then and they knew what his views were.
And denying someone a new account is different to kicking out an existing customer.
KYC is an ongoing process though, that’s actually a statutory mandate in the UK as it closely ties into things like AML laws. That also means that, as the views of an organisation change, they come to reassess their business with people.
In another way, as the world changes, so does that person within it. Coutts might have had Mugabe when he was a knight of the realm, or pals with Maggie, but as the world changed I imagine they would have reached a point of no longer wanting a business relationship with him.
Thing is, Nigel knew and has signed that he understands, that as a public figure the bank may break ties with him over his public statements. He may have been more visible before, but if the ads I see on my mum’s YouTube are any indication, he’s making a lot of money from people selling financial snake oil; maybe that’s the straw that broke the Coutts’ back.
Edit: also, he wasn’t denied an account; he was denied some specific private wealth management perks.