Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the UK financial regulation myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
A tribunal has upheld the chief UK financial regulator’s decision to fine a bank owned by David “Spotty” Rowland and two of its former employees including his son for plotting to devalue Qatar’s currency during a 2017 trade embargo.
The judgment is a further blow for Banque Havilland, which has shrunk significantly and been renamed Rangecourt, following a series of legal controversies and regulatory probes in recent years.
But it is a victory for the Financial Conduct Authority, which lawyers said reinforced its ability to hold companies to account for the actions of their employees by seeing off the challenge against it by Havilland and the two former employees.
The Upper Tribunal said on Tuesday it had reduced the size of the fine imposed by the FCA on the bank from £10mn to £4mn, saying the regulator appeared to have chosen “an arbitrary figure” for the penalty.
But the tribunal upheld the action the FCA took against two former employees of the bank in 2023, when it imposed fines of £325,000 on its ex-UK head Edmund Rowland and £14,200 on its former analyst Vladimir Bolelyy.
It also upheld the FCA’s decision to ban Edmund Rowland and Bolelyy from working in the sector, saying they and the bank were responsible for “a very serious breach” of UK rules that was “deliberate and encouraged the commission of financial crime and market misconduct”.
The controversy hinged on a presentation drawn up by Bolelyy, a Russian who worked as an analyst at Havilland, outlining a plan to attack the Qatari riyal and break its peg to the US dollar by using a manipulative trading strategy to lower the price of the country’s sovereign bonds.
The presentation, initially dubbed “Setting fire to the neighbour’s house fund”, was created in response to a request by Abu Dhabi sovereign fund Mubadala for Havilland to come up with a strategy to reduce the risk from Qatari bonds owned by banks in the United Arab Emirates.
The tribunal said it was “not satisfied” that the presentation drawn up by Havilland was ever delivered to Mubadala, adding that “the strategy was never implemented and there was no actual market manipulation”.
But it rejected the bank’s argument that it could not be held responsible for the presentation because it was not created “on bank business” but for a private project of its owners, the Rowland family.
Claire Cross, a partner at law firm Corker Binning and former FCA official, said: “Firms cannot avoid responsibility by merely claiming that the misconduct of their employees was informal, unsanctioned or outside direct supervision.”
Steve Smart, executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA, said: “Motivated by greed, Banque Havilland, Mr Rowland and Mr Bolelyy had a plan to seriously damage the Qatari economy. It is right that they have been held to account.”
Luxembourg-based Banque Havilland was created after its acquisition in 2009 by David Rowland, the former Conservative party treasurer and adviser to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, previously known as Prince Andrew.
Since being fined by the FCA and separately having its Eurozone banking licence withdrawn by the European Central Bank in 2024, the lender has wound down its UK operation and sold its Monaco-based business.
The tribunal said it was not satisfied that David Rowland knew about the controversial Qatar presentation. But it found his son, Edmund, was “seeking to benefit the commercial interests of the bank and of the Rowland family generally”.
It also rejected David Rowland’s assertion that the FCA had a “preconceived case theory or that it had somehow been weaponised by the state of Qatar”.
Rangecourt and lawyers representing Edmund Rowland and Bolelyy did not respond to requests for comment.
