Government ordered changes to report on Barclays use of loan scheme

Business department told auditors to amend report on Barclays' use of state-backed scheme to reflect bank's response

A government department ordered changes to the report of an independent investigation into a loan made by Barclays under a state-backed lending scheme in order to reflect the bank's views, the Guardian has learned.

An MP has said that amendments undermined the relationship between ministers and civil servants, and called for an inquiry into the process.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) had asked the auditing firm RSM Tenon to investigate whether a 2006 Barclays loan to a company owned by businessman Jeffrey Morris contravened the now defunct small firms loan guarantees scheme (SFLG). The programme cost the taxpayer nearly £200m in compensation for banks, with Barclays claiming £69,471 for the Morris loan when the company defaulted on it in 2009. There is nothing to suggest Barclays behaved improperly.

RSM Tenon delivered its report at the end of October last year, but BIS asked the firm to amend it. The Guardian has learned that within three hours of receiving Barclays' response to its report, BIS told RSM Tenon to "review and amend the report to reflect this response".

RSM Tenon submitted its amended report a month later. According to an internal BIS email, the altered report "reflects a 'softening' towards Barclays' position following recent discussions". Alec Shelbrooke, Conservative MP for Elmet and Rothwell, who has been pursuing Morris's case for almost a year,said: "Ministers need to be able to trust the reports given to them by civil servants and this episode fundamentally undermines that relationship. The permanent secretary now needs to launch a full investigation."

The scheme for startup businesses, which guaranteed banks a return if the borrower defaulted, cost the taxpayer at least £183m between 2006 and 2008. The Guardian reported on the loan last year, prompting BIS to instruct RSM Tenon to carry out a review.

It found that Barclays believed Morris had a net worth of more than £20m at the time the loan was made, but an SFLG loan was only permissible if the borrower had exhausted all other forms of collateral.

The government then guaranteed to repay 75% of the amount outstanding on the loan to the bank if it went bad.

The report was immediately shown to Barclays and the bank was asked for its response.

The notes of a conference call between BIS officials, RSM Tenon and Barclays held on 31 October reveal that Barclays asked for time to address the issues in the report. BIS declined to comment.

On 9 November Barclays produced its response to the RSM Tenon review. It attempts to discredit a previous internal reportby Barclays, which had concluded Morris had a net worth in excess of £20m, which should have precluded Barclays from offering a loan under the SFLG. In a statement, Barclays said: "RSM Tenon audited the loan based on all available information and concluded that 'the loan and the business appear to meet the eligibility criteria of the scheme at the time' and that they had 'no reason to believe that the bank did not follow their normal commercial lending processes, as applicable and expected of the lenders in 2006'.

Barclays was accused of lending multimillionaire businessman Jeffrey Morris (above) £200,000 under scheme meant for budding entrepreneurs"Recent evidence provided by Mr Morris' solicitors to BIS and RSM Tenon did not change this conclusion."Separately, Barclays is seeking to enforce a multimillion pound high court judgment obtained against Mr Morris, but we are unable to comment on this as it is subject to on-going litigation."On 21 November last year RSM Tenon submitted the amended report, including the new line that the auditor had "no reason" to believe that the process was flawed. It added: "Overall we have no reason to believe the bank did not follow their normal commercial lending processes." The amended report was released under the Freedom of Information Act in January this year but was heavily redacted to exclude some of RSM Tenon's more serious continuing concerns.

Article Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk

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Archbishop backs payday loans alternatives

Justin Welby suggests credit unions use church halls in effort to promote alternative to £2bn payday lending industry

Two thousand years after the financial services industry was ejected from church premises, the Archbishop of Canterbury not only wants to invite the money-changers back in – he wants churchgoers to help them expand their lending.

Justin Welby is promoting credit unions as a credible alternative to the booming £2bn payday lending industry, and says it will help match often vulnerable, low-income borrowers with the most appropriate lenders. He is proposing that credit unions be allowed to use church halls and other properties in order to better access customers. Welby also wants to encourage churchgoers with financial expertise to help these lenders.

Welby, who sat on the parliamentary commission on banking standards and has been an outspoken critic of the financial industry, believes a successful credit union sector could pose a challenge to high-street and internet payday lenders, who target often vulnerable borrowers with expensive loans.

Malcolm Brown, the Church of England's director of mission and public affairs, yesterday said: "It is not about regulating them [payday lenders] out of business. If the market is functioning as it should, there should not be any need for them to exist."

The government has also pledged to spend £38m to strengthen credit unions.

Speedy Cash loans shop in Brixton, south LondonMany high street banks have retreated from offering small, short-term loans in recent years, while demand from low-income groups has soared, sparking an explosion in lightly regulated payday lenders.Welby's intervention comes as ministers and regulators also grapple with how best to curb the ballooning payday lending industry without choking off small-sum credit to low-income groups. Consumer minister Jo Swinson will meet with lenders as well as with debt charities and campaigners to discuss what she calls "widespread irresponsible lending".

Last night she said she would tell companies: "The industry needs to do so much more to get its house in order, particularly in terms of protecting vulnerable consumers. I am concerned that the lenders are not living to the spirit or the letter of the codes of practice."

However, in a weekend column in the Sun newspaper Swinson made clear the government would not impose a cap on loan costs. "That could shut down short-term loans and force people towards illegal loan sharks or other extreme measures," she said. "The solution needs to be more sophisticated than this."

While Welby's plans stop short of inviting church commissioners, who oversee £5.5bn of the Church of England's wealth, to put financial muscle behind credit unions, he nevertheless wants the church to use other means at its disposal to get behind such lenders. The church is also building plans for its own in-house credit union for the clergy, which it hopes will eventually help it build expertise that can be shared with grassroots lenders.Labour's shadow treasury minister Chris Leslie said ministers had "consistently ducked clamping down on predatory pricing and extortionate interest charges". He said regulators already had the power to control costs and loan duration but the political will was absent.

Payday lenders have variously been accused of failing to properly compete with one another on the cost of loans; of conducting too few checks on the financial means of borrowers; and of using overly aggressive tactics to extract repayments.

The OFT referred the industry to the Competition Commmission last week, after repeated warnings that it must get its house in order met with only mixed responses.

Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury. His intervention comes as regulators grapple with how to curb the payday lending industry.One successful payday lender, Wonga.com last week increased customer loan costs to the equivalent of 5,853% APR. Speaking ahead of the meeting with Swinson, co-founder Eric Damelin claimed his company and others were being "used as political footballs". He claimed to be in favour of regulatory reform. "We don't want no regulation, as we want to keep the bad guys out".

At the top of the agenda for the meeting Swinson has called will be the new regulatory regime, which comes into force from April next year, under which industry must answer to the Financial Conduct Authority rather than the Office of Fair Trading. Officials from both the FCA and the OFT will address the meeting.

Last month the House of Common's public accounts committee said the OFT had been "ineffective and timid in the extreme" in regulating payday lenders.

Article Source : http://www.guardian.co.uk

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Loans, optimism scarce for most small businesses

For entrepreneur Maurice Lopes, the plight of today’s small business owner is epitomized by a cartoon that depicts a bunch of people staring through the window of a bank, while a policeman swings a club to try to get them to disperse.

Lopes said the punch line read: “What’s the matter? Never seen somebody get a loan before?”

All joking aside, Lopes confessed it’s not a pretty picture for startups and small firms trying to raise what he called “gap funding” of less than $500,000 in the current economy.

Earlier this year Lopes, a serial entrepreneur who also runs catering and dog-walking businesses, launched EarlyShares.com crowdfunding platform to try to fill the funding void. The site stemmed from his own frustration with being turned down for a $500,000 loan to expand his three-year-old Miami-area catering company – Kiddie Catering – because his bank needed him to show two years of consecutive profits.

“Banks are not lending to small businesses to start or expand,” said Lopes, whose catering business employs 25 people and is on track to pull in revenues of $400,000 this year. “A lot of commercial real estate transactions are getting SBA (Small Business Administration) loans, but not to small businesses for working capital.”

EarlyShares is similar to Kickstarter, but with one major difference. “We don’t have projects, we have companies,” said Lopes, who has signed up 1,500 small businesses and more than 30,000 investors since President Barrack Obama had the crowdfunding portion of his Jobs Act legislation approved last spring.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) still has to finalize the regulations around it, which Lopes expects to be done by the end of March. Until that time, Lopes said they are blocked by “a Chinese wall,” because his company is “not allowed to show general unaccredited investors investment opportunities.”

EarlyShares acts like a funding matchmaker, pairing companies seeking between $100,000 to $500,000 with investors, who can lend them as little as $100 in return for a 5 or 6 percent dividend.

For the purposes of getting more bang for their buck, Lopes encourages investors to spread the money around in small increments. “Don’t put $2,000 in one company, put $100 in 20 companies, because 50 percent of them might fail and you want to be able to have a return.”

While funding remains scarce at the lower levels, SBA lending for the top 13 U.S. banks grew by $11 billion from September 2011 to September 2012.

Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE:WFC), the country’s largest lender of SBA 7(a) loans, last month reported the bank topped the $1 billion total for the second-straight year – the first time it has ever done so.

While it acknowledged most of those loans were for “rent replacement” as small business owners borrowed money to buy the buildings that house their companies, Wells Fargo’s SBA lending head Dave Rader said the average loan size was $391,000.

Rader also said he’s seeing “savvy borrowers with better financial statements.”

However it’s not all roses. A new Wells Fargo poll showed small business owners are feeling extremely uncertain about the economy in the wake of the impending fiscal cliff and Obama’s election win, according to the bank’s head of small business lending Marc Bernstein.

“The striking change has occurred in the future expectations index, where we’ve seen the biggest decline in years,” admitted Bernstein. “That’s primarily related to people’s anxiety about the whole fiscal cliff issue and the uncertainty around Washington right now.”

The Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index fell 28 points, from a positive reading of 17 to negative 11 in the post-election survey of 607 small business owners conducted November 12-16.

Bernstein said the survey results could also have been negatively impacted by the stock market slump that accompanied the election results, but described the quarter-to-quarter drop as “dramatic.”

One of the most concerning areas of the poll was in regards to the hiring expectations of small business owners over the next 12 months. About 20 percent of respondents said they intended to decrease the number of jobs at their companies in the next year – the largest percentage in the survey’s nine-year history.

Additionally, nearly 30 percent of business owners expect lower revenues in 2013, up 11 points from the prior reading and the highest percentage of small businesses expecting decreasing revenues since 2009.

Bernstein said if the debt-deal talks in Washington continue unresolved and fiscal fears spillover into the New Year, then Wells Fargo could start to see a reduction in the number of small business loans.

“If the decline in revenues occurs that people worried about in here, I would expect to see some poor performance.”

Article source :http://uk.reuters.com

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