[2025] UKUT 00185 (TCC)

On 4 October 2018, the day after the Bank received Deloitte’s draft engagement letter, Mr Arden emailed Mr Sutherland as follows:

“We continue to make good progress on remediating the classification of commercial risk weights in our lending portfolio. We are currently in the process of engaging an expert third party to provide external assurance over work completed to date and provide a full review of our RWA calculations
and COREP reporting. This work will be in three distinct phases and take a number of weeks.

As you can appreciate, and as was made clear by you in our meeting, Aileen [Gillan] and I need to be sure on the efficacy and accuracy of the results of this exercise before we submit any changes. As a consequence, COREP reporting for September will be materially unchanged, save for any business as usual movements. I trust this is in line with your expectations, though please do not hesitate to let me know if you have any questions.”

On 9 October 2018, Mr Sutherland responded, saying “That’s fine David, thank you for confirming”. His unchallenged witness evidence was that he “viewed it as a pragmatic solution to the issue of COREP submissions which required the input of specific figures when Metro Bank was in the process of conducting a remediation of its Pillar 1 commercial risk weightings and its capital requirements”.