Watchdog to Force Banks to Disclose Number of Politically-Inspired Account Closures Following Farage Debanking

Kurt Zindulka

Britain’s banking watchdog has demanded that the UK’s 25 largest banks and building society lenders reveal the number of accounts they have recently closed and if political motivations were involved in their decision-making as the Nigel Farage debanking scandal continues to rock the financial landscape in the country.

Big banks in Britain will have until August 25th to give the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) a full accounting of the number of accounts they have either closed, suspended, or refused to open and the justification for doing so after Treasury chief Jeremy Hunt wrote to the regulator demanding that the FCA “urgently investigate” debanking practices following the revelations that Brexit boss Nigel Farage had his Coutts accounts shut down for failing to “align with the values” of the banking group. A full report from the FCA is expected to be made public by September.

“The Financial Conduct Authority has the right to fine banks very large sums of money if they find this practice is widespread,” Chancellor Hunt said per The Telegraph. “I want to know if it is, and I want to know what they are doing about it.”

“I’m worried that it may exist more than we had thought,” he said of the debanking situation. “And the reason I’m worried is because free speech is a fundamental human right. And you can agree or disagree with Nigel Farage but everyone wants to be able to express their opinions.

“But in today’s society you need a bank account to function and so a threat to be de-banked, as the word is now widely used, is a threat to your right to express your opinions.”

It has been estimated that over the past four years alone, banks have shut down some one million accounts of customers in the UK, with at least 200,000 being closed so far this year. The true scale of the actions taken by the big banks remains to be seen, however, as the figures released last week under Freedom of Information requests only counted those closed for suspected financial crimes and not for political motivations.

In addition to demanding that the FCA investigate the debanking scandal, the government is also planning to introduce legislation in the autumn requiring banks to provide a 90-day warning to customers before their account is closed and to give their reasons for doing so.

Commenting on his primetime GB News programme, Nigel Farage welcomed the swift action from the government and that the FCA is planning on investigating the big banks, but questioned where the City watchdog had been before he blew the whistle on the political bias in the banking industry.

“Where on Earth have the FCA been as this national scandal was unfolding? It took me to lift the lid on all of this and for others to start coming out, the FCA should have been on to this a long, long time ago,” he said.

The Brexit leader suggested that the supposedly politically-neutral regulator may have had other “priorities”, pointing to a blog post on the FCA website penned last week by the Director of Authorisations Laura Dawes entitled ‘Pride matters in financial services and beyond’.

In the article, Dawes revealed that she and other members of the FCA were planning on attending the Leeds LGBT+ Pride parade on August 6th and that she had “marched at the London event with around 60 of my FCA colleagues”. Dawes went on to argue that Pride should be something observed “year-round”.

Sheldon Mills, FCA executive director of consumers and competition, who attended the London Trans Pride event said: “This was a march for transgender, non-binary, gender non-conforming and intersex people, so as a cisgender gay man, I was an ally and that made me reflect on the need to continually seek to support and make visible the less than one per cent of the population who are transgender and face significant challenges in so many aspects of their daily lives.”

Responding to the clear political bias from the regulator, Mr Farage said: “What the hell is going on marches, making political statements, what the hell has got that got to do with financial market regulation? I would say pretty much nothing.”

The Brexiteer said that the statements from the FCA executive demonstrated that the watchdog is “unfit for purpose” and that it is likely that the impetus for the encroachment of woke ideology into the banking sector was “encouraged” by the regulator itself as the “fish rots from the head down”.

Farage is not alone in this assessment, with a group of Conservative MPs and former top financial figures writing to Chancellor Jeremy Hunt over their belief that the FCA had spurred on the debanking movement by encouraging banks to adopt the ESG (environmental, social, and governance) principles.

ESG, which has been used globalist institutions such as BlackRock to force firms into adopting progressive tenets of faith on issues such as race, gender, and climate change, has been likened to the social credit score implemented in Communist China and has increasingly become a major political issue on both sides of the pond in the fight back against woke corporate culture.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter: or e-mail to: kzindulka@breitbart.com

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