Former boss of Gupta-linked Wyelands Bank fined £120,000

The former boss of a bank linked to steel magnate Sanjeev Gupta has been fined close to £120,000 for not managing the troubled bank’s exposure properly.

The Bank of England said that former Wyelands Bank chief executive Iain Mark Hunter would pay £118,808 and promised not to do certain jobs in the future.

It comes close to a year after the Bank’s Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) said that it would have fined the lender £8.5 million if it was not already winding down.

Wyelands had lent far too much money to Mr Gupta’s GFG Alliance, which it was also linked to, the PRA said at the time.

It did not have proper strategies in place to manage this risk or to mitigate potential conflicts of interest, the Bank said.

The PRA said that Mr Hunter had “failed both to act with due skill, care and diligence and to take reasonable steps” to ensure that Wyelands had proper systems in place to manage its exposure to certain customers.

The Bank said: “Mr Hunter also failed to comply with Wyelands’ internal policy, which had been created to mitigate potential conflicts of interest arising from its membership of the Gupta Family Group (GFG) Alliance and failed to take appropriate steps to verify the accuracy of statements he made about Wyelands in two letters he wrote to the PRA.”

In 2020, the Financial Times claimed that Wyelands had channelled some of its depositors’ money into Mr Gupta’s business empire using a network of companies controlled by his business associates.

Greensill Capital, the now collapsed lender, which at one point employed former Prime Minister David Cameron as an adviser, was one of the biggest backers of GFG Alliance companies.

The GFG Alliance declined to comment.