Nigel Farage has received an offer from Coutts to reinstate his bank accounts, but the GB News presenter is after more than personal vindication.
Speaking to Dan Wooton on GB News, the former Ukip leader has expressed a desire for his experience to inspire widespread and tangible reform.
Farage’s crusade against the NatWest Group and its subsidiary Coutts resulted in the resignations of chief executives Dame Alison Rose and Peter Flavel.
However, the NatWest Group chair, Sir Howards Davies, has dug his heels, vowing not to quit, and instead appointed law firm Travers Smith to conduct an independent inquiry.
Farage has called the investigation “an absolute joke,” highlighting comments made by the firm’s Chair Emeritus, Chris Hale, referring to the Brexit campaign as “racist, xenophobic, and nostalgic.”
Farage added: “There is no prospect of a decent review.”
On sending a letter to Coutts demanding a formal meeting, Farage said: “I want to sit down face to face and find out how this happened, why this happened. I want you to accept you've broken the law.
“I want you to accept that you've taken up an inordinate amount of my time. You've cost me a great deal of money in legal fees already, which I've used all the way through to make sure that I was dotting the i's and crossing the t's.
“But more important than all of that, I want to know how many other people had accounts closed at NatWest and Coutts because of their opinions. And what can we do to make sure that nothing like this ever happens to anybody else in your banking group again?"
More than 1,000 accounts are being closed every working day, a report in The Mail on Sunday has revealed.
On the sheer size of this number, Nigel reflected: “Most of these people aren't in my position, they haven't got the platform, they haven't got the opportunity to fight back.
“So if I can speak up for all of those people, we can deal with this nonsense. If we can get ultimately to the position where having a bank account becomes a right in our country, because you can't function otherwise in the 21st century without it, that would be a real victory.
“And that's where I want to get to. Let's get politics out of banking, let's get prejudiced out of banking.”
Farage addressed the personal impact generated by the intense scrutiny of the media firestorm: “I had to publish defamatory material about myself which has fed the left wing trolls and others many accusations that have been buried.
“I've said from the start I didn't need to go public on any of this. It was always going to be potentially humiliating and difficult.
DEBANKING LATEST:
- Grant Shapps politically ‘penalised’ as family embroiled in de-banking debacle: ‘It is mad!’
- Nigel Farage launches debanking fightback as 1,000 bank accounts are closed every day - 'This is ruining lives in Britain'
- Nigel Farage says he 'absolutely supports' Gina Miller's right to have a bank account
“And so some of it has been, but I felt somewhere in my water there was a bigger story here. And what we're learning is there is actually a national debanking scandal that is going on.”
With the wind in his sails, Farage is bullish about the prospect of instigating lasting change.
He said: “I think there's a big national scandal here. I hope I've lifted the lid on it. I hope it leads to a bigger, broader public debate on a variety of levels and genuine reform, cultural reform from within the banks and other institutions.”
He added: “Look, we all want to stop money laundering, but frankly these rules are hurting men and women running small businesses. I'm actually quite ambitious for this. I really am."
from GB News https://ift.tt/iQwS2Lx
