The former boss of a bank linked to the steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta has been fined nearly £120,000 for not managing the troubled lender’s exposure properly.
Iain Mark Hunter, the former chief executive of Wyelands Bank, will pay a fine of £118,808 for failing to ensure the lender had adequate systems and controls, the Bank of England said on Thursday.
Wyelands Bank, which began winding down in March 2020, was part of the Gupta Family Group (GFG) Alliance, a sprawling business empire ranging from finance to metals that was the largest client of Greensill Capital, the financing company that went bust in 2021 after one of its main insurers declined to renew its cover.
Greensill employed David Cameron, the foreign secretary and former prime minister, as an adviser at one stage, and was one of the biggest backers of GFG Alliance companies.
Hunter has promised not to work in a regulated UK financial sector role in future as part of a settlement with the Bank of England’s regulatory arm, the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA).
Sam Woods, the Bank’s deputy governor for prudential regulation and the PRA’s chief executive, said: “This outcome reflects material breaches of the PRA’s senior manager conduct rules and individual conduct rules.
“If senior individuals fail to meet the conduct rules, as Mr Hunter did, it undermines the trust in financial institutions and the wider financial system. Mr Hunter failed to take reasonable steps to ensure that large-exposures risks relating to Wyelands’ business were appropriately identified and mitigated, and failed to take appropriate steps to verify the accuracy of statements he made to the PRA.”
Hunter also failed to comply with Wyelands’ internal policy designed to mitigate potential conflicts of interest arising from its membership of the GFG Alliance, and failed to take appropriate steps to verify the accuracy of statements he made about Wyelands in two letters he wrote to the PRA, the regulator said.
The PRA said Hunter had agreed to settle after the end of the discount period, and therefore did not qualify for a 30% reduction in his fine.
The Bank issued a public reprimand to Wyelands Bank – which Gupta renamed after his country house and estate near Chepstow in south Wales – last April for “wide-ranging significant regulatory failures”.
The PRA said it would have fined the lender £8.5m had it not already been in the process of winding down. Wyelands had lent far too much money to GFG and did not have proper strategies in place to manage this risk or to mitigate potential conflicts of interest, it said.
GFG said at the time that it had supported the PRA in the process, and had provided funding to ensure that all depositors were repaid in full and that the bank was able to operate to “conclude its solvent wind-down”.
GFG is a group of companies, many related to steel and aluminium production, spanning 30 countries. It has previously said it has 35,000 employees worldwide, and its Liberty Steel business has significant operations in the UK.
Hunter, who now works for the chief governance office at GFG Alliance in Dubai, was contacted for comment. GFG Alliance declined to comment on Hunter’s fine.
