Lord Myners calls for radical overhaul of Co-operative Group
I know the COOP independent members are currently being lampooned as in denial backwoodsmen but frankly I think their model irrespective of its governance problems in the short term is right for our times. Mutuality is a good way of building local initiative and rewarding people for helping each other. I know nothing of Lord Myners but the financial institutions which prevail in the environment he comes from can really offer us little to be proud of apart from being expedient when it comes to making money and perhaps too big to be allowed to fail. I hope in all the current negativity swirling around this story the value of cooperatives as a concept doesn’t get too devalued. I think it holds the key to many rural opportunities around alternative service provision. This article tells us:
Radical overhaul of the way the Co-operative Group is run is needed if the UK’s largest mutual is to survive the traumatic shocks of the past year, the City veteran charged with its reform warned on Wednesday.
Lord Myners, Labour’s City minister during the banking crisis, set out in “stark terms” the need for urgent reforms to the chain of supermarkets, funeral homes and pharmacies as he warned that the banks – owed £1.2bn by the group which lost £2.5bn last year – could force the organisation to embark on fire sales of its prized businesses or increase the borrowing rate on loans without a commitment to change.
Publishing a 180-page report, Myners said the board – which he wants to abolish, and currently made up of members of the co-operative movement such as nurses, farmers and public sector workers – was “stuck in denial” over what he described as a “near ruinous” failure of governance, which led to the near-collapse of its bank last year.
“This board is not competent to perform the duties expected of it,” he said, as he called for the Financial Conduct Authority to broaden the scope of its investigation into the bank. Myners said: “There must be a public policy question here, how a Group with eight million members could have become so badly managed and lost so much money. I think that’s something the FCA needs to consider.”