“The reality is that there are things that go wrong within firms, which the senior management will not know about, and that is a fact,” the Financial Services Authority’s head of enforcement told sceptical parliamentarians.

Tracey McDermott was giving evidence again to the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards (PCBS), whose members yet again taxed her on the FSA’s failure to hold to account senior individuals at errant banks such as UBS and RBS. One of the commission’s members, Pat McFadden MP, asked why the FSA had not interviewed senior UBS managers during its investigation into the rigging of the London Interbank Offered Rate, enabling them to tell the parliamentarians they knew nothing about the market manipulation at their bank until they read about it in the newspapers.