According to section 5(1)(a) of the Building Societies Act 1986 (as amended) a building society’s “purpose or principal purpose is that of making loans which are secured on residential property and are funded substantially by its members”.
No doubt building societies have lots of statutory powers (and/or permitted powers under their constitution documents) to carry out activities ancillary to that main purpose, but I don’t know why my local building society (the Cumberland) has chosen to associate itself quite actively (via a section on its website and posters in its branches) with Cogo (though read on, and you might gain an idea why it does so).
The Cumberland Building Society website offers up this:
Cogo’s free app enables you to view and reduce the carbon footprint of your spending.
The app highlights ways for you to improve and compensate for your climate change impact by using Open Banking to view your bank transactions and access real-time information about your carbon footprint, enabling you to become a more conscious consumer.
Cogo are on a mission to empower hundreds of millions of consumers and businesses worldwide to become conscious consumers and we’re pleased to partner with them.
Partnering with Cogo is the first step on our journey to understand our impact on the climate and the environment around us, learning more about this will us [sic] build future plans to help us do our bit for the planet.
The first step, apparently, involves this:
The app is free on both iOS and Android, simply follow the link below to download it. When creating your Cogo account you will need your Cumberland Internet Banking Username and Access Code to link you accounts together.
That worried me, for starters. I realise that where some aspects of technology are concerned I am very old-fashioned, but in this age of internet and banking fraud, I think it is important to be careful about supplying private financial information to third parties. Why would I want to supply my building society account information to a third party in order to set up a virtue-signalling app? And, sure enough, if you have got this far, and read the “legal stuff” at the foot of the website page, you will find this:
If you click through to Cogo, you will be leaving the Cumberland and entering their website which is subject to their own Data Privacy Notice. We recommend that you read it before providing Cogo with any personal information or connecting your Cumberland account to their app.
FAQs include one asking how Cogo uses personal data. This is the answer:
Open Banking uses secure technology. Cogo works with consents, online, which is regulated and approved by the Financial Conduct Authority. This means your data is securely stored and encrypted so it can only be used for features that are necessary to the Cogo experience.
Fair enough, I suppose, but this bothered me:
With your consent via Open Banking, Cogo will help you identify opportunities for you to shift your spending to businesses that better align with your values. We do this by analysing your bank transactions to identify which businesses you’re currently shopping with. We never share your personal transaction data with any third parties. We use very aggregated, completely anonymous data to report on the overall impact of Cogo community and to make the case to companies for improving their business practices (e.g. 15% increase in spend at business X by customers who care about the Living Wage).
Big Brother is watching you (if you let him).
Another question asks whether I can really make a difference. To which the answer is:
Yes, you can! When you join Cogo, you become part of a winder [sic] community where everyone’s individual actions add up to make a significant difference. This can’t happen without the actions of every single member, including you.
It depends what you mean by a significant difference, and difference to what exactly? If it’s about making a difference to climate change, then patently the correct answer is “no”. And it’s clear that calculating carbon footprints is definitely their thing, as you discover if you follow the links to the FAQs at the Cogo website.
The Cogo website also tells us:
Through Open Banking, the Cogo app can help you measure your carbon emissions, give you personalised ways to reduce them, and certified options to offset the rest of your footprint.
Now we’re getting somewhere. My guess is that someone will be making money out of those footprint-reducing “certified options”.
By the way, Cogo’s website tells us that its own “carbon footprint” for 2021/22 is 18.35t CO2e.
Remind me. What are building societies for?
Climate Scepticism 
That’s a no thanks from me.
You could file this under “green jobs”: an otherwise pointless exercise that is only valid in a world obsessed by carbon dioxide, an effort that is not only non-productive for society, it is anti-productive for it.
In other green tech news, it seems that PayPal has banned the Free Speech Union, for not shutting up, or something: https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/21/big-tech-is-waging-financial-war-on-dissenters/
Pity, because PayPal is a useful service. Now I’m going to be conflicted about using it.
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But JIT, we have to be obsessed by carbon dioxide: there’s a shortage of it – again!
“Why is there a CO2 shortage and how will it hit food supplies?”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-58626935
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Two questions immediately spring to mind:
a) I presume the setting up and operation of all this ‘free’ carbon-footprint-cum-personal-transaction information tracking actually costs somebody something, so who in the end is funding it?
b) Are all these hidden costs included in Oxford University’s calculations?
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Hi Mark
“Big Brother is watching you (if you let him).”
1. Isn’t that rather presupposing his/her/its gender? Tut, tut! 😉
2. As if by magic:
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John,
At first I thought your point about the cost of this sort of thing was potentially a little exaggerated. Sorry, I was wrong, and you make an important point. The net zero Nirvana relies heavily on encouraging behavioural changes, and nudges such as these are an important part of this. Somebody is paying these people, and in the absence of a belief in the need for behavioural changes, one could argue they are just an on-cost and that they add nothing to GDP. Destructive, not constructive, “green” jobs, in other words.
There are loads of organisations like these. Individually, their costs might be modest. Collectively, they add up to a lot. I am sure it’s never included in calculations of costs relating to “the project”.
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Yes indeed. Think of it as an additional quality control function but one that is administered at the level of the private individual as well as at corporate level. Such overheads are usually the first to be trimmed when times are tough, but we are supposedly living in a time of crisis that seems to have protected and inflated the budget. Taken individually the costs can be relatively modest, but when they are scaled up to the magnitude required to effect societal change the costs must be huge. In fact, the scale of the operation is so huge that (courtesy of universal ESG obligations) companies now seem keen to make it part of their core business to apply such quality control on behalf of their customer base. It’s not adding anything to the effective and efficient prosecution of business and it’s one of the things that HSBC’s Stuart Kirk was bemoaning.
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In a similar vein the Co-op bank is now advertising that it has not supported fossil fuel investment for over 20 years. Pity their share-holders.
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Jit (back a while):
Not just the Free Speech Union but The Daily Sceptic has had this disgraceful and punitive treatment. And the latter is most definitely climate sceptical as well as covid quizzical these days. So bang on topic, however narrowly one construes the CS mandate.
I’m sure others will have seen that Jack Dee has unexpectedly joined the fray, saying he’s closing his PayPal account as a result, without mentioning Toby Young’s outfits explicitly (as far as I have seen). He’s also spoken well of Andrew Doyle, creator of the witty ‘Titania McGrath’ parody on Twitter. Andrew founded the Comedy Unleashed comedy club in the East End with Andy Shaw, who’s definitely a climate realist. (You see, I’m trying hard not to stray out of bounds.)
I intend to cover this and related news about Big Tech on the Bit Rot thread. Because this is all about limiting debate, as was always my concern there. Big subject.
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H/t Jaime Jessop.
There’s a very interesting reference to Cogo in this article:
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/what-a-wunch-of-bankers
Are the pieces of the jigsaw beginning to make a picture?
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Joe Public’s link to a tweet in comments above, is looking particularly prescient.
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Mark, we should be very concerned by the fact that Farage may have been specifically targeted because of his campaign to get a referendum on Net Zero. They know what he did with Brexit, so de-banking him is probably a ruthlessly effective means to shut down his campaign before it gets off the ground. It’s also very concerning that banks are now starting to consider granting mortgages only for properties with EPC ratings C or above. So if you can’t afford to, or won’t upgrade your old house to meet modern standards of heat efficiency, then you are unlikely to be able to sell it, except to cash buyers. IMO this is an assault on property ownership rights which could eventually result in all older, less energy efficient properties effectively becoming stranded assets.
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Not a Farage-lover second but I took encouragement from both of these.
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Good news for the ‘unbankables’.
BBC BREAKING NatWest boss Dame Alison Rose to step down
As they were saying …
plus Toby Young etc. CEOs will hopefully be more wary of ESG, DEI et al
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That was at once the top story on BBC News, with just one sentence. Now there’s a few more, with the second one being:
Farage has I think been thinking straight by not over-criticising the BBC after receiving an apology from them. Woke corporate vandalism was the key menace here. The E-sceptical within ESG-scepticism thank him.
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When I wrote “What are Building Societies For?”, I confess I had little idea how deep the problem was. I was just irritated my local building society was encouraging its customers to provide their confidential banking details to a third party in order to use an app to measure the carbon footprint of their expenditure. I thought that was a completely irresponsible and inappropriate thing for a building society to be pushing. I had no idea how deep the rot actually went.
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Richard,
So Rose has resigned for breaking the confidentiality of a customer and wrongly stating to a BBC reporter the reason for the closure of Farage’s bank account. But the real issue is the dossier obtained by Farage detailing exactly why his account was closed – for political reasons. Who is going to resign over this? Farage also claimed that he was unable to find ANY alternative bank which would agree to the transfer of his funds. Is this still the case? That’s a much more serious issue than a CEO breaking customer confidentiality rules.
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It’s not just Farage. De-banking is becoming common practice.
https://celiafarber.substack.com/p/chase-bank-shuts-down-dr-joseph-mercolas
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Jaime:
No, the real issue is that the resignation of the NatWest CEO went straight to the top of BBC News at 2:25am, that it’s now a subject of a ‘LIVE’ page, and that this will send a warning to all such miscreant woke CEOs.
Of course debanking to punish wrong-thinkers is more widespread than this. I think of a guy who experienced it for a stretch in 2003-05. I won’t give details of the list of banks that refused me because it’s too painful. Or of the lovely one which finally rebanked me.
It was Farage getting this to be the top story, with the help of Downing Street and Jeremy Hunt, that I thought was worth recording. (Quick look at phone in er, bathroom, by chance within a few minutes of the release of the news.)
Those at Coutts who called Farage xenophobic etc as they assessed his right to have a bank account will surely now get the chop. And that too will be top news. As I said to Ian Woolley last night in a Bristol wine bar, foreseeing the way this was going, this is good news for the country and for all possible future victims.
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There are several “real issues” here, and they aren’t mutually exclusive. I don’t think one trumps the others. They are all significant, and although I am not a Farage supporter, I think he has done the country a service by bringing these issues to our attention and by possibly triggering a backlash.
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Richard, I’ll wait and see whether any other heads roll at Coutts and Natwest, directly related to the decision to debank Nigel Farage based solely upon his ‘unacceptable’ political views. When (if) that happens, then I shall be satisfied that progress is being made. When it is made illegal to close personal and business accounts without providing a proven valid reason, where ‘valid reason’ does NOT include the customer having views which are deemed to be ‘unacceptable’, then I will be even more satisfied. I’m not convinced that this is just a mere skirmish in a war which is waiting to be won or lost – and in that respect, I don’t trust Farage and never have done since he stitched up Brexiteers by doing a deal with the Tories at the last election. I’m more than a little sceptical at all these senior Tories suddenly coming out in defence of ‘free speech’ in the press.
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Hmm, interesting.
Does that mean that UK energy policy will go back to wholly rational overnight? No.
Does it mean that the likes of Lord Deben and his many, many younger sidekicks in the corridors of power, all on the make, will be given pause for thought about how much they are truly treasured by the current goverment, a regime they have recently been berating? Yes.
Talking of being on the make …
Money talks. And these losses, and potential losses, also send a message. The government doesn’t love you as much as you thought.
(Motives for that lack of love can be less than pure. I’d agree with Jaime to that extent. But this all adds up to good news, not least to Net Zero sceptics.)
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Richard,
I have serious concerns about the extent to which people in top jobs are a shoe-in to all sorts of quangos, panels, and non-executive roles elsewhere.
Whatever her faults, I accept that Dame (why a dame, by the way?) Alison Rose is an exceptionally capable woman. However, I don’t care how capable she is, I don’t believe anyone who is paid more than £5 million per annum for their main job should have enough time spare from their main highly paid job to take on other jobs. My suspicion is that either she hasn’t been spending enough time at NatWest or she can’t be devoting much time to the other roles. Either way I think what is going on here is wrong.
Dame Alison is merely illustrative of a bigger problem. So many people moving in top circles simply walk into positions that either shouldn’t exist or should be done by someone else. There is a serious danger of groupthink here, with no alternative views penetrating the inner sanctum.
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Agreed, except I would replace serious with proven!
The thing today is, how many in the inner sanctum have found themselves out on their ear as fast as Rose? Ever?
For me it’s a signal of a government finally having a valid excuse to show how fed up they are of being held hostage by so much tedentious in-house climate buffoonery.
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I didn’t realise Rose was a climate change nut, as well as a multimillionaire ‘Dame’ and CEO of a major bank, part owned by the taxpayer. These people have their finger in so many pies, it’s hard to keep up.
“After Alison Rose was appointed the first female chief executive of RBS (later NatWest) in 2019, she announced that “tackling climate change would be a central pillar” of her leadership. Had Rose misread the job spec? Did she think, perhaps, that she had assumed control of Extinction Rebellion rather than a leading capitalist institution?
No, it was apparent that Rose saw her role as primarily ideological rather than tediously financial. “Put simply,” she said, “tackling the climate emergency is one of, if not the biggest issue of our time – and banks have a massive role to play in mobilising the power of finance to meet the net zero ambition”. On that very same day, the bank ended new loans for oil and gas extraction, a ruinous piece of virtue signalling which hampered the British people’s access to their own bountiful natural resources.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/dame-alison-rose-must-now-resign-as-head-of-natwest/ar-AA1e8qv5
Just how the hell can you make ‘tackling climate change the central pillar’ of your leadership of a major bank? By de-investing in fossil fuels obviously. She was placed there deliberately by the Green Blob in order to do just that. So I ask again, was this one of the principal reasons why Farage had his accounts closed down?
“He’s not an MP, he doesn’t lead a political party anymore, what on Earth is Nigel Farage doing on this list? Like him or loathe him, the evidence of the past decade has been that where Farage goes, the Tory party often follows. First it was Brexit, then it was the “small boats.” Now, net zero is featuring more and more often in the former UKIP leader’s GB News and social media rants.
The talking points are fairly familiar — the cost to ordinary people of installing heat pumps, the fact that China’s still burning loads of coal so why should we bother? But Farage thinks his arguments will gain more traction when the “impracticalities” of achieving net zero — as he puts it — come to the fore in the next few years. “Whenever politicians collectively agree around one point, they’re almost always wrong in history,” he told POLITICO.”
https://www.politico.eu/article/20-people-matter-uk-race-net-zero-climate-change/
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Jaime:
I had assumed she was, because of the pernicious influence of ESG, the stance of the Bank of England (though that is reported to have changed into something more rational in the last 24 hours) and the fact that I saw her described as woke early on in the Farage-Coutts saga. But it was only this morning, as the BBC reported she had been removed from Rishi Sunak’s business council, from being co-chair of the energy efficiency taskforce and as a member of the net zero council, that I knew she had been a part of those crucial groups in government that we all knew so much about. (Nil out of three for me. Anyone who can better me? Genuine question.)
Well exactly.
I’m sympathetic to that view. NatWest did seem to be doing the de-investing in fossil fuels thing. Or at least pretending to. One never knows about everything.
Well, it’s ok to ask but it’s also really important to be evidence-based. Farage got the document from Coutts showing the paper trail leading up to his account being terminated. Cue Sky News six days ago:
I’ve not seen anything about net zero, let alone the push for a net zero referendum, being mentioned by Coutts as a reason for closing the account. Have you?
This is important not least because the BBC, and reporter Simon Jack, in this instance, have been creditably evidence-based. That is exactly what has landed NatWest and their former CEO in hot water.
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The latest on the BBC News Home Page, albeit well below the screaming top story with help from the UN July set to be world’s warmest month on record
Farage account row leads Coutts Bank boss to quit
So that has also happened, which some above were waiting for. Note how after direct and relevant quotes from Farage himself the BBC chooses Ed Miliband, ‘shadow climate change and net zero secretary’ to gently pour cold water on a carefully constructed straw-man “a sort of grand conspiracy against lots of people”.
“Whether banks can terminate accounts due to a person’s political views” does to me seem an interesting question. But nothing compared to our “era of global boiling” of course.
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Richard,
Farage’s views on Net Zero were in fact mentioned in the 40 page dossier:
‘Net zero is stupid’
The bank also accuses him of being a “climate denier”.
A Guardian article from March 2022 refers to his venture Britain Means Business and its campaign Vote Power Not Poverty, which called for a referendum on the government’s green targets.
He also said “Net zero is stupid” and called for supporters to “kill off Boris’s green agenda”.
https://news.sky.com/story/key-points-from-coutts-dossier-on-nigel-farage-12924078
Whether or not they were just one crime among many other more significant thought crimes committed by Farage, or whether in fact his views on net zero were one of the principal reasons for closing his bank accounts we shall probably never know. But, I think it is significant that the CEO of NatWest was obviously a climate change nut on a mission to divest the bank from fossil fuels and in that respect, Farage’s prominent anti net zero views, recently and repeatedly stated on his show, might have been the straw which broke the camel’s back. Weighed against Rose’s ideological mission to ‘green’ future investment at NatWest and help save the planet, Farage’s “nasty, xenophobic and racist” political views and their associated ‘reputational risk’ to the bank, would seem to be a bit of a sideshow.
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Jaime: That is very helpful, thank you. Googling has now, in a few slightly tricky steps, taken me to the full PDF of the 40 pages.
I want to look into the details. On Alison Rose being a “climate change nut” maybe she was just going along to get along? Don’t get me wrong, that does make her a nut, just like Ed Miliband is. But Ed’s not been near the levers of power since shortly after his disastrous Climate Change Act in 2008. She was right in the thick of it up till this month. But I sure didn’t know her name or the names of the three key organisations she was part of. I’m grateful for Farage fighting this in such an intelligent way, which has meant that we all – well, I speak for myself – have learned much more about the precise shape of the Green Blob in Whitehall.
More when I have digested this.
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Richard, thanks for finding the dossier. Net zero/climate denial is mentioned a number of times throughout. The dossier was prepared in November 22 but an early notification to exit Farage was triggered in March 23 when he paid off a mortgage ahead of time. So I’m guessing that Farage knew he was going to be debanked by Coutts in March 2023, but only went public in July, when they actually closed his accounts.
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It looks as though the BBC is fighting back, on behalf of one of its favourites:
“Gina Miller’s political party bank account to be closed”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66328098
But there is absolutely no equivalence to the Farage story. The account in question is for her political party, not a personal account, and the reason for the closure of the account has been explained (after an initial annoying refusal to do so) – allowing it to be opened in the first place was a mistake, as the bank in question doesn’t have political party bank accounts. There is no suggestion that Ms Miller has been personally de-banked (although I don’t share many of her political views, I would be as outraged on her behalf as I am on behalf of Farage, not all of whose views I hold).
At least it’s good to see that now that it’s apparent it’s not just Farage who’s been affected, the MSM and its favourites are coming out in agreement with him:
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“How the left learned to love the banks
The Nigel Farage banking scandal has exposed the ‘progressive’ left as the stooges of the elite.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/07/28/how-the-left-learned-to-love-the-banks/
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Thanks indeed Richard for finding a link to the dossier. It’s well worth a read. Strange times indeed – an internal Coutts report (that’s Coutts, bankers to the rich) quoting extensively from the Guardian and from the Left Foot Forward website in seeking to vindicate its recommendation that Nigel Farage be de-banked because of – inter alia -his opposition to net zero.
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What’s that I see in the report? A British bank looking for dodgy connections with Russia as a pretext for debanking someone? Have they any idea how many billions of roubles from Putin’ mafia have been laundered through the British banking system?
Strange times indeed.
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The great Kemi Badenoch in the Sunday Times (via archive.today). It isn’t just Farage.
Kemi Badenoch: Diversity obsession has led to Kafkaesque madness
Badenoch also mentions the case of Maya Forstater, who responded and clarified as follows
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FWIW the BBC reports that Farage has said that Coutts has offered to reinstate his personal and business bank accounts
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Richard, I despair I really do. Kemi was correct in saying that there are no protected groups, only protected characteristics. So up pops Nurtural to try and prove her wrong, by citing Sec 7.7, only he/she just demonstrates that Kemi was correct, even in the case of ‘transsexuals’. Nowhere in that short text does it mention ‘protected group’, Nurtural just decides to interpret it as implying ‘group protection’, but the text is very clear and not open to such interpretation. I’m afraid Maya just lent unearned credibility to Nurtural’s statement by replying ‘Yes that’s true.’ It isn’t true. How many people casually reading that Twitter exchange now believe that Kemi Badenoch was wrong and that there are protected groups, transgenders being one of them?
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Of course, the banks are claiming that they are just undertaking due diligence to protect them from reputational risk. However, to underline what I said earlier regarding London’s role in the sanitising of dodgy Russian money, this is what Catherine Belton had to say in her book, “Putin’s People”:
“In those days one senior Western banker told me how he and his colleagues would order due diligence reports on new clients that would conveniently self-destruct on their computers once they’d been read, erasing anything that might have raised alarm bells. For good measure, a whole industry grew of corporate investigations firms producing background reports that conveniently whitewashed the colourful histories of Russian tycoons.”
So it seems that, as far as bankers are concerned, the idea of just what diligence is due depends a great deal on how much they can financially benefit from turning a blind eye. I think that bankers should be reflecting upon the fact that they have very little good reputation to protect anymore.
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Jaime: I assumed that Maya, given her own legal battles over a number of years, and now helping other people who have been unfairly dismissed and the like, knew her onions on the Equality Act. I therefore assumed that, although Kemi was speaking the truth about the main thrust of the act, for something like pregnancy “not all protected characteristics are symmetrical” was fair.
But this is not my specialist subject. Do you have some sources that explain further?
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While I’m on this here’s another area of law I know little about: PEP. Kemi expresses that banking customers should not be “punished for speaking their minds with a draconian application of Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) regulations.” Because they are subject to PEP Coutts drew up the document they did, that Farage later got access to. That much I think I understand. How anyone can work out which part of the man’s views were decisive in the closure of his accounts I don’t know. How central was net zero given his anti-EU campaigning for so many years, generously interpreted as making him “xenophobic and racist” and a former “fascist”? I assume he did highlight the most relevant parts there. Anyhow.
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Richard,
I too was unfamiliar with the concept of the PEP and the attendant regulations. So I had to look it up. It seems it is all about being on the look-out for money laundering:
“If your client is a PEP, you should apply enhanced due diligence measures. You should also treat business with PEPs on a case-by-case basis.
Under regulation 35 of the Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing and Transfer of Funds (Information on the Payer) Regulations 2017, (MLR 2017) if your client is a PEP you must:
• get senior management approval for the business relationship
• take adequate measures to establish the source of wealth and source of funds
• closely monitor the business relationship throughout”
https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/topics/anti-money-laundering/peps
The very idea that organisations that did their level best to facilitate the handling of Putin’s stash, back in the day when London was called Moscow-on-Thames, should now see themselves as occupying a moral high ground on this issue just beggars belief. There is an irony here that just keeps on giving.
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Richard, I’m afraid I don’t have any specialist sources to provide you with. I was just commenting in a general sense.
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Richard,
Further to my comment above, I have looked at the Act and it defines ‘prohibited discrimination’ as being one person (A) unfavourably treating another person (B) on the basis of B having a protected characteristic. All protected characteristics (including transsexualism) have the following descriptive text:
“(a) a reference to a person who has a particular protected characteristic is a reference to [description of person having protected characteristic].
(b) a reference to persons who share a protected characteristic is a reference [description of persons having protected characteristic]
But the actual legislation as far as I can see does not make it illegal for a person or persons to discriminate against a group of people on the basis of them sharing a protected characteristic; it appears to be drawn up to protect individuals based upon their possession of a protected characteristic.
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Thanks for the feedback J & J. I feel none the wiser, to be honest. But that speaks of a more general problem 😉
I was struck in the last 24 hours by this short YouTube excerpt about the terrible situation in Canada: banks freezing the accounts of protesting ‘truckers’ – and even people who had merely donated to them.
One of the five major Canadian banks which complied with Trudeau in doing this has apologised. As Peterson says, they all should have done so. But even one institution with conscience enough to do the right thing means a lot.
We are further ahead than that in the UK right now, I feel, with Farage outside the governing elite doing well in exposing a general evil and Badenoch doing the same from inside, singling out other, arguably more worthy examples of concern. And (to hark back to my original hobby horse) Alison Rose’s departure has also exposed the shape of the green blob near the top of quangoland.
Here’s one thing that struck me as Sunak and co tried to cut loose, a little, from net zero imprisonment after Uxbridge. Lord Deben’s immediate diatribe against his own party’s new approach, as he was about to depart from the CCC and quangoland generally, did not provoke a single peep from those like Alison Rose and alongside her to defend the government’s new tack. The green blob knows it has a script and is richly rewarded for sticking to it. Hence Rose’s salary and benefits in a bank largely owned by government. As Cummings is wont to say, quoting others, the government doesn’t control the government. But democratic pressures are now being felt, ever so slightly.
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More on Nat West – who are probably rather bigger offenders than the Cumberland Building Society. Paul Homewood has picked up on the story:
Yes, it’s our old friend Cogo:
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