(Bloomberg) -- Barclays Plc discussed buying Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in October 2008, at the height of the banking crisis, according to former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Brown makes the claim in his forthcoming memoirs, “My Life, Our Times,” to be published Nov. 7. According to Brown's office, the book “reveals how, without the money to do so, Barclays tried to buy Royal Bank of Scotland, as well as Lehman Brothers.” Brown's office declined to give more details.
The book extracts are highly critical of the behavior of banks before, during and after the crisis. Brown complains that there were no significant fraud prosecutions in Britain after the credit crunch, and accused Barclays of “not telling the full truth” about its financial situation at a point when other banks were being bailed out.
But it is Brown's suggestion that Barclays tried to buy RBS that has intrigued historians of the time.
“It's genuinely surprising,” said Iain Martin, author of “Making It Happen,” the story of the RBS collapse. “The month before, Barclays had been prevented from buying the collapsing Lehman Brothers. Shortly afterwards, it was struggling to avoid being part of the state-backed recapitalization. But then all manner of fantastical conversations happened at that time, before people realized the true state of the British banking system.”
Will Bowen, a spokesman for Barclays in London, declined to comment. Brown, who left office in 2010 after losing a general election, said the bank's behavior when it went to the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in search of funding was “unconscionable.”
“I was always suspicious of the bank's lack of openness with their shareholders -- and the public -- about the deal it did with the Gulf states,” Brown wrote. “And I was always unhappy that Barclays chose to use their deal to make a political statement: denouncing our state recapitalization of the banks.”
--With assistance from Gavin Finch and Donal Griffin
To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Hutton in London at rhutton1@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson at fjackson@bloomberg.net, Tony Czuczka, Thomas Penny
©2017 Bloomberg L.P.
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