An investigation by the BBC2 programme Newsnight claims that Royal Bank of Scotland’s turn-round division Global Restructuring Group (GRG) “damaged thousands of viable businesses in pursuit of profits for the bank”.

The investigation revealed thousands of previously unseen internal documents, adding further pressure to GRG, which has been under investigation by the Financial Conduct Authority since the publication of the Government’s Tomlinson Report in 2013.

Responding to Newsnight’s revelations and having reviewed a selection of the RBS files, Lawrence Tomlinson (pictured) has declared them ‘evidence’ of the allegations made in his report.

He said: “The files show the Royal Bank of Scotland, and its executives, took the opportunity to make profit from businesses in distress while telling them that they were there to ‘help’.

The files show the excessiveness of fees and interest charged by GRG; they also unequivocally demonstrate the ‘value-added’ to the bank’s balance sheet through GRG’s work on risk-weighted assets.

As a result, GRG has damaged thousands of viable businesses in the pursuit of profit for the bank.”

Mr Tomlinson added: “It is a national disgrace that UK tax payers, as majority shareholders in RBS, have been picking up the legal bill for all these reviews and investigations, when the bank could simply have held up its hands and put things right.

“All businesses affected by GRG deserve an immediate apology from the bank while the Government considers how a compensation scheme should be structured. The Government should also consider how this behaviour was enabled by the conflicts of interest in the professional-services industry.”