The politician at the centre of the "de-banking" row has described the FCA's reported finding that political views played no part in these cases as an "absolute farce."

The UK financial regulator says it has found no evidence that politicians are being denied bank accounts or rejected from existing ones because of their views, a report said. 

The findings come from the Financial Conduct Authority, Bloomberg quoted an unnamed source as saying. The FCA reportedly declined to comment. An earlier version of the report appeared in the Financial Times.

The regulator is due to publish findings soon from information from banks about account closures and the reasons for these moves.

In August, the UK Treasury asked the FCA to probe the phenomenon of “de-banking,” following political and media fury at how and why Coutts, part of NatWest Group, shut an account of former UKIP leader Nigel Farage. (The UK government owns 40 per cent of NatWest after that bank, formerly known as Royal Bank of Scotland, was bailed out in 2008.) The saga also revealed that a number of other figures with ties to the political world, including Dominic Lawson, the son of the late UK Thatcher administration cabinet minister Nigel Lawson, had struggled to open bank accounts. Even the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, revealed that he had been refused an account. In another case, anti-Brexit campaigner and City figure Gina Miller had an account shut down.

Yesterday's Daily Telegraph reported that the FCA said it had not examined the Farage case.

The Farage episode and others raised fears that people in banks, perhaps motivated by political bias or contemporary cultural ideas, are shutting accounts of people they dislike, or are over-zealously enforcing controls on “politically exposed persons.”

“This [FCA finding] is an absolute farce. There are so many people who have been de-banked for political reasons, because their views don’t align or because they are PEPs,” Bloomberg quoted Farage as saying. 

(Editor’s note: I have already given my own views on this case, and others.)