Mark Kleinman is Sky News’ City Editor and the man who gets the Square Mile talking in his weekly City AM column. Today, he tackles name and shame at the FCA, a gamble at Entain and a business group revamp

FCA is naming and shaming itself, not the City

It’s rare to get a consensus this strong – but then it’s rare to get a set of proposals as fundamentally misguided and cackhandedly communicated as the Financial Conduct Authority’s ‘name-and-shame’ rules.

The row between the City watchdog and the City itself has been rumbling for months; and in the context of the government’s increasingly desperate efforts to project a pro-business stance, it has left the regulator and its chief executive, Nikhil Rathi, increasingly out on a limb.

A letter I’ve obtained from eight of the UK’s leading financial services trade associations – including UK Finance, the Investment Association, the ABI and AFME – as well as the City of London Corporation makes clear the overwhelming disdain for the FCA’s revised proposals.

In the letter, the bodies make clear their strong opposition to the reforms.

“Our principal concerns are twofold: around the potential for unwarranted damage to firms’ reputations; and the risk of undermining UK competitiveness,” it said.

“We also believe that the introduction of a new, broad ‘Public Interest Test’ in place of the narrower ‘Exceptional Circumstances Test’ is both unnecessary and would increase the culture of regulatory uncertainty which our members report is already proving damaging to the UK’s competitiveness.”

The joint letter advocates a number of alternatives that the FCA could pursue, such as sharing anonymised information on enforcement activity, and reserving public notifications of enforcement probes for “the harmful activities of unregulated firms and regulated firms operating outside the regulatory perimeter”.

At a time when Britain’s economic regulators are under scrutiny like never before, ploughing on with its revised proposals is a non-starter for the FCA, as Rathi and his chairman, Ashley Alder, must now surely accept.

With the Treasury obliged to announce in the next few months its plans for the leadership of the FCA – Rathi’s contract expires at the end of September – there is every incentive for ministers to lean harder on the watchdog to amend its plans far more radically, or scrap them altogether. For Rathi, ending his tenure on the note of an unseemly scrap he cannot hope to win must seem equally unpalatable.

Is Stella David Entain’s next gamble as permanent CEO?

I did say it was a gamble. Last summer, I wrote here that whoever took the job of Entain chief executive would be taking a risk with their reputation. I hadn’t envisaged, however, that the owner of Ladbrokes would appoint someone so apparently unsuited to running a major public company.

The announcement last week that Gavin Isaacs, a former Scientific Games Corporation executive, was stepping down after just five months in the job reflects a flagrant lack of due diligence on both sides.