Who is the FCA to say who is ‘fit and proper’?

This morning the FCA issued a final notice, banning Jonathan Burrows, a former Blackrock Asset Management Investor Services managing director, from performing any regulated function in financial services.

The FCA declared him as no longer ‘fit and proper’ to carry out a regulated role. The reason why? Because he knowingly failed to pay his full train fares on multiple occasions.

In my view, this just smacks of hypocrisy. While of course no one should be fare dodging, is this action bad enough to be banned from ever having a regulated role in this industry?

He didn’t cause client losses, he didn’t manipulate markets, yet now he can never manage a single penny again.

Mr Burrows is in the wrong for failing to cough up enough cash to a train company, therefore increasing fares for those of us who do buy our tickets. But did he ever pocket a penny of his client’s cash? No.

Yet the regulator, who as it was revealed last week, made a number of mistakes in its life insurance review briefing, resulting in billions being wiped off listed insurance firms’ share prices, has not had a single employee among it’s ranks deemed unfit and improper or banned from taking lucrative jobs elsewhere in this industry.

Last week the review carried out by Simon Davis, partner at law firm Clifford Chance, was highly critical of the FCA’s handling of its review into the life insurance industry, stating the regulator’s manner was “high risk, poorly supervised and inadequately controlled”.

The report stated: “When it went wrong the FCA’s reaction was seriously inadequate and fell short of the standards expected of those it regulates.”

John Griffith-Jones, FCA chairman, said: “As a regulator we hold ourselves to the highest standards and in this case we fell short. I am determined the FCA will learn the lessons, and we will do our utmost to ensure that a situation like this will never happen again.”

Mr Davis told the Treasury Committee that it was up to them to take further action, so I suspect no heads will roll for this and no fines will be handed down, although some senior executives said they wouldn’t be accepting bonuses.

This is simply not good enough. Law firm CMS said last week that if any regulated firm had behaved in this way they would have been fined millions and the chief executive sacked.

This poor chap from Blackrock is being forced out of regulated financial services for dodging train fares, yet the organisation who really caused market manipulation gets off scot-free because of its position.

There is something seriously wrong with this.

donia.o’loughlin@ft.com