The Financial Services Authority's finding that Sir Fred Goodwin and his colleagues at the Royal Bank of Scotland were merely misguided fools is perhaps not surprising. Evidence heard in other inquiries – notably the Treasury select committee's – had suggested that fraud and dishonesty were not required to bring the pride of Scottish banking to its knees. Incompetence, and a failure to appreciate the true nature of the risks on the balance sheet, were enough.
But while the FSA's conclusion was predictable, the failure to publish the report is deeply unsatisfactory. The regulator has not had to justify its conclusions by displaying its evidence or methodology. Today's summary of a 17-month inquiry into the near-collapse of one of the country's biggest banks ran to 12 sentences. Amazing.
The FSA argues that its hands are tied by the Financial Services and Markets Act (FSMA) of 2000: that it can only publish information that leads to enforcement action.
Thus the crucial question of whether Goodwin was a megalomaniac whose ambitions were not reined in by Sir Tom McKillop, the AstraZeneca chemist in the chairman's seat at the time of the disastrous acquisition of ABN Amro in 2007, is answered this way: "We did not identify... a failure of governance on the part of the board."
And that's it. It's feeble. We don't get a flavour of the minutes of the board meetings at the time RBS decided to bid for ABN. Neither do we learn what PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accountancy firm that did the day-to-day work in this investigation, asked the former RBS directors.
If the FSMA is the problem, it's time to change the law. Parliament should request that the RBS report be published as fully as possible. It is reasonable to keep commercially sensitive information under wraps. But taxpayers, having coughed up £45bn to keep RBS alive, are owed a fuller explanation of why their cash was needed.