[2025] UKUT 00185 (TCC)

At the relevant time, Ms Aileen Gillan was the Bank’s Chief Risk Officer. She provided two witness statements, was cross-examined by Mr Stanley and re-examined by Mr Jaffey. Her second statement said, in support of the Applicants, that in October 2018 “the quality of the data was so poor that it would have been impossible, without a loan-level review of non-retail lending, to have had certainty around the number".

Under cross-examination she gave straightforward answers to Mr Stanley’s questions, while continuing to emphasise the degree of uncertainty. For example, although she agreed that it was known by July 2018 that (a) the CLIP loans had been wrongly risk-weighted at 50% rather than 100%, and(b)this affected £1.1bn of loans, she rejected Mr Stanley’s suggestion that the error was therefore “going to make a difference of hundreds of millions”.

However, she also accepted that the figure of £574m was the best estimate the Bank had at the time, and that the Bank had also understood that “any further adjustments to calculations are not expected to be material”. By the conclusion of her oral evidence, we accepted that she was distinguishing between that best estimate and the remaining doubt as to the precise value of CLIP loan adjustment required.