By IRNA,
London : Sir Fred Goodwin, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), has become the first major casualty of the financial crisis in the UK, after paying the ultimate professional price for by agreeing to leave the company 10 years after joining.
His decision, along with chairman Sir Tom McKillop, who will also step down, comes as the British government was forced to bail out the bank, taking up to 57 per cent of its shares in the biggest nationalization of a bank in Europe.
RBS, which owns the Natwest and is one of Britain’s four clearing banks, saw its shares continuing to plummet Monday, falling by more than 10 per cent by lunch time after halving in value last week.
The resignations were accompanied with HBOS chief executive Andy Hornby and chairman Lord Dennis Stevenson also leaving their posts with the government injecting Pnds 17 bn (Dlrs 29 bn), Pnds 3 bn less than with RBS, in its rescue merger with Lloyds TSC.
Confirming the cash injections, Chancellor Alistair Darling described the departure as the “right thing” to do but denied that ministers would be involved in day-to-day decisions, saying the banks would be run “at arm’s length” from the government.
Last year, both the chairman and chief executive of Northern Rock, Britain’s fifth biggest mortgage lender, were also forced to resign after it became the first victim of a credit crunch that started in the US.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown insisted Monday that the government must be a “rock of stability” for British people during the unprecedented financial crisis.
Brown also told bankers that he wanted world leaders to gather for a new Bretton Woods – the conference held in 1944 which helped draw up the post-war financial order.
European and Asian markets rallied in response to efforts made by world leaders to end the recent financial turmoil, but no one is saying that the crisis is over or how far the impact has yet to go.