Great Meeting For SME Alliance – Key Issue Still RBS!

Yet again we had another great meeting and yet again it was courtesy of Jonathan Maskew of Shensmiths Barristers http://www.shensmithbarristers.co.uk/ and our exceptionally generous hosts, 23 Essex Street Chambers http://www.23es.com/

We are very grateful to them all for making these events possible.

We'd also like to thank Damon Parker of Harcus Sinclair  http://www.harcus-sinclair.co.uk/ Mark Humphries of Humphries Kerstetter http://www.humphrieskerstetter.com/ and James Haywood of RGL Management  http://suerbs.com/ for being on our first panel and for answering our members questions. Some of the answers were quite eye opening and not least insight into how banks legal teams look at litigation against SMEs. And of course we want to thank the members of our own panel, Steve, Andy, Peter, Jon, Ray and Paul for their brilliant support. I never fail to be amazed at their collective knowledge on banking issues! 

I don't think anyone could fail to notice a large percentage of questions in the room were RBS related. I really, really fail to see how RBS can ever get back on its feet, regain trust and pay back the billions they had from the taxpayer while there is no attempt to repair the damage it has done to SMEs and in particular via its GRG division.

As yesterdays meeting proved, the legacy issues so many SME owners are still trying to resolve, are not going away and no one is giving up. It's all very well the senior management of RBS insisting they plan to re-create a trust worthy bank but this cartoon (sent by one of our members) says it all!

Laura did film quite a lot of the meeting, therefore, rather than do a detailed blog on the issues raised, we'll edit the film and put as much footage up as possible – and then we'll fill in the gaps via a members newsletter. We'll get the film up ASAP and hopefully by tomorrow.

In the meantime, here's a couple of pictures from the meeting. Thank you so much to all the members, some of whom travelled so far to be with us.

Sadly, the one picture we're missing is of our Chairman extraordinaire, Nick Gould, in his totally exclusive SME Alliance cap – which the Turner girls had made especially for him!