Under fire deputy chief at RBS resigns

Royal Bank of Scotland’s Chris Sullivan, the deputy chief executive officer whose evidence to the parliament was criticised by legislators, has left the bank.

The 57-year-old, departed Britain’s largest taxpayer-owned lender on December 31, a spokeswoman for the Edinburgh-based bank said.

RBS said in February he would retire in 2015 after helping to oversee the restructuring of the bank. He could not be reached for comment through the bank.

Treasury committee chairman Andrew Tyrie said in July that the bank had been “willfully obtuse” in its evidence to the parliament in June by saying that its Global Restructuring Group did not profit from small business customers in financial distress. RBS apologised for the “materially incorrect” evidence in November, Tyrie said at the time.

CEO Ross McEwan, 57, is seeking to shrink assets and cut costs to help boost profits and return the 80% taxpayer- owned lender to full private ownership. Mr Sullivan, an employee of RBS for almost 40 years, became deputy CEO in February when McEwan combined seven units into three.

Mr Sullivan was head of the corporate bank from August 2009 to January 2014. RBS’s Global Restructuring Group tries to turn around firms and is “absolutely not a profit centre,” Sullivan told parliamentarians in June. That contradicted a report by former Bank of England deputy governor Andrew Large with consultant Oliver Wyman & Co, published in November 2013 and commissioned by RBS, which said the bank ran its turnaround unit as an “internal profit centre”.

* Bloomberg