Remember that time the Conservative Party wrote to pensioners spruiking the 4% codger bonds and pretending to be an official communication from the Government? Sure ya do because I blogged it.
Back then, either Rowena Mason or Patrick Wintour got the following response from a nameless “Treasury aide”, i.e. one of Osborne’s spads aka @ToryTreasury, either Rupert Harrison, Poppy Mitchell-Rose, Eleanor Shawcross, or Ramesh Chhabra.
A Treasury aide said: “HM Treasury officials checked and confirmed this is FCA-compliant.”
Got that? HMT, he claims, checked that this was compliant with the Financial Conduct Authority’s rules. I can tell you now, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act request I filed, that has just been answered, that they did no such thing or at least the FCA denies it has any record of it. I’ve caught and rethrown it to NS&I.
The FCA also says that if you asked it, it wouldn’t answer because it doesn’t “pre-approve” financial promotions. It also says that National Savings & Investments is outside their authority because it belongs entirely to the Treasury, oh miracle. However, they also specifically deny that anyone checked.
Presumably the check consisted of Osborne asking himself if he thought it was OK, but in that case, why bother saying that they checked that it was OK with the FCA when the FCA doesn’t have anything to do with it?
Well, they don’t say “we checked with the FCA and they told us it was compliant”. So they could be telling the truth and the checking consisted of, say, looking at the FCA Handbook or similar and satisfying themselves that it was OK. And of course the FCA wouldn’t know they’d done it.