Johnny Cameron, the former head of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc’s investment bank, agreed to never again hold a senior-management role at a financial company in order to resolve an investigation by Britain’s markets regulator.

Cameron, 55, reached an agreement with the Financial Services Authority without admitting guilt or the regulator finding him at fault as part of its probe of RBS’s systems and controls, the agency said in a statement. The agreement means he will be able to work as a financial consultant.
“Given the losses sustained by RBS in 2008 I recognize that it is appropriate I take my share of responsibility,” Cameron said in a statement through his lawyer, Charles Evans of London-based Norton Rose LLP. He said he wouldn’t seek another senior-management position.
Cameron is the first executive of RBS, the Edinburgh-based lender majority-owned by the UK government, to settle with the FSA. RBS is facing five separate investigations following a 45.5 billion-pound ($65.6 billion) government bailout. The UK Treasury ousted Chief Executive Officer Fred Goodwin when it took control of RBS in October 2008. Cameron stepped down that same month.
“We welcome the conclusion of this investigation with a settlement between the FSA and our former director Johnny Cameron,” RBS spokeswoman Lisa Irvine said.
Cameron wouldn’t get approval to become an executive again if he applied, the FSA said. As a way of improving risk management, the regulator has made it harder for people to gain approval to be executives that exert a “significant influence” over firms. Were it not for the settlement, the regulator said it would have taken steps to ban Cameron from the industry.
Cameron’s undertaking comes less than a week after the creation of Britain’s first coalition government in 65 years gave the FSA a reprieve from being broken up. Prior to the election, the Conservative Party said it would carve up the agency’s powers.
The FSA first said it would examine senior managers of collapsed banks, or those that had accepted government money, in March 2009. Two former executives of Northern Rock Plc, which was nationalized in February 2008, were banned by the regulator last month for hiding the number of impaired mortgages from the bank’s board and the wider market.
In addition to the investigation into systems and controls at RBS’s investment bank, the FSA is also probing how well the bank handles customer complaints; its anti-money laundering compliance; its takeover of parts of ABN Amro NV in 2007; and its 2008 rights offers.
(Source: Bloomberg)