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    Bank CEO Faces Consequences after Closing Conservative’s Account, Lying about It

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    One of the more pernicious ways the left is trying to silence conservatives is by using debanking to shut people up: who can speak out against issues that are important and contentious if doing so gets you kicked out of the banking ecosystem necessary for everything from buying groceries and paying bills to saving for retirement?

    Such is what happened to the conservative politician behind Brexit, Nigel Farage, who was debanked by NatWest Bank for what it claimed were “commercial” reasons but which he proved were really for political reasons: the bank didn’t want to keep him around because of his populist political stances.

    As background, Farage, a talk show presenter on the populist right and  the former leader of the pro-Brexit U.K. Independence Party (UKIP), recently announced that his bank account had been unfairly closed because of his political beliefs.

    As is usual, the regime media ran a story to try and discredit him. That regime outlet was the BBC, and it cited anonymous sources who claimed that Farage’s account was closed because Farage did not meet Coutts’ 1 million pound borrowing requirement.

    But Farage was ready to strike back and prove his point. To do so, he fired off documents he obtained from the bank in which officials were shown to have discussed the “reputational damage” associated with keeping him as a customer of the bank becuase Farage was “seen as xenophobic and racist” and “considered by many to be a disingenuous grifter.”

    The BBC later corrected the story, saying, “We acknowledge that the information we reported – that Coutts’ decision on Nigel Farage’s account did not involve considerations about his political views – turned out not to be accurate.”

    Well, the bank’s CEO was fired after an uproar over the incident. The AP, reporting on her firing, said, “The chief executive of NatWest, one of Britain’s biggest banks, left her job on Wednesday after discussing personal details of a client — the populist politician Nigel Farage — with a journalist amid a furor over financial institutions’ power to refuse customers for their political views.” The bank, for its part, said that Alison Rose was leaving “by mutual consent.”

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    Farage, for his part, posted about the matter on Twitter, saying: “STATEMENT Dame Alison Rose has now admitted that she is the source. She broke client confidentiality, and is unfit to be CEO of NatWest Group. Meanwhile, Coutts CEO Peter Flavel must take the ultimate responsibility for de-banking me based on my political views. Sir Howard Davies is responsible for overall governance. He has clearly failed in this task, least of all by endorsing their conduct. In my view — they should all go.”

    He also announced a plan to help those who have been debanked, saying, “I will soon be launching an exercise to gather together all of those that have been de-banked. We will build a very large database of cases to find out which banks are worst offenders. This is how we will make a fundamental change in the system.”

    Featured image credit: By Euro Realist Newsletter – flickr.com, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7670040