CITY AND SUBURBAN
Brief for NatWest's new counsel: credit delayed is credit denied
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Lord Alexander of Weedon, the Desert Orchid of Lothbury, came galloping home in the NatWest Chairmanship Stakes with my tenner firmly on his nose. (If only Cheltenham had been like that....) The board must believe in horses for courses, for who better than the mighty advocate and regulator to see off or settle with the inspectors of the Department of Trade and Industry? What NatWest needs is a finding that any mischief was all in the subsidiary, County NatWest, and that all those con- cerned have now gone. What it has to fear is a finger pointing to the management of the parent bank, suggesting that it erred, if not by commission, then by omission. The City, as I have said, senses uneasily that the DTI after Barlow Clowes could use a big win and fancies the NatWest to supply it. Lord Alexander joins in May as a deputy chairman, to succeed Lord Board- man at the year-end, and both would be happy to see everything cleared up by then, but life and DTI inquiries tend not to be like that. Their lordships' simplest course, and to my mind their best, will be to press Lord Young to set his inspectors a time limit. The inspectors should be asked for an interim report on the role of the parent bank, they should make that their priority, they should produce it by a specified date. It would be intolerable to leave the inquiry hanging like a sword over NatWest and its management while the inspectors take their indefinite time. DTI inspectors habitually take time. Though these inspectors have evidently got steam up, they are, after all, busy professional men, with many other claims on their diaries. The inspectors who acquitted John Ritblat of insider trading took a year to assess the type of evidence which Lord Alexander as chairman of the Takeover Panel is used to handling in a day. When reports go in, the DTI has never been a hairtrigger publisher. Inspectors who do not acquit all their subjects can take even longer to have their reports published. They have to wait while the Director of Public Prosecutions makes up his mind and then may have to wait again, lest the publication of their report should prejudice a trial. The standing of NatWest and its management is a matter of national in- terest, and Lord Alexander will have every right and duty to defend that. If justice delayed is justice denied, then credit de- layed is credit denied.
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