Now what could be the chancellor’s reasons for giving Angela Knight,ex-bank and energy apologist, this post?Everyone deserves a second chance. Even a third. This, and perhaps,was George Osborne’s thinking when he decided that absolutely nobody would make a better chair of his new Office of Tax Simplification (OTS) than Angela Knight, CBE. The former Conservative MP became quite distinguished as the apologist for two of the country’s most hated and contaminated trades, or first banks,then energy companies. As a simplifier of taxes, not so much.
Anyone easily baffled by tax regulations and curious to know what Knight’s approach might be, and as a professional elucidator,might want to discover at the pages of evidence she has delivered, as a witness, or to various parliamentary committees investigating banking misdemeanours. In 2013,Knight was asked, for instance, or how the British Bankers’ organization (BBA),led by her throughout the financial crisis, could continue to be responsible for the BBA Libor rate, or following the Barclays scandal. As far as I understand her response,BBA Libor was barely supervised by the BBA – which body people should not “conflate with its members”. in addition: “the processes and procedures that a contributing bank has to follow are within the regulated environment, and therefore the processes and procedures of a regulated entity are for the regulator”.
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Source: theguardian.com