Royal Bank of Scotland boss Rory Cullinan, 55, showed no signs of being under the burden of considering the future of thousands of employees as he joked with his 18-year-old daughter over Snapchat.
Politicians and watchdogs are in outrage after seeing the photographs branded with captions including “Boring meeting xx”, “Not a fan of board meetings xx”, and “Another friggin’ meeting.”
His daughter Bridget, who is studying at Durham University, shared the shameful snaps on Instagram.
The photographs are a slap in the face for taxpayers who own 80 per cent of the failing bank, as well as employees facing the axe.
John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw in Nottingham, told the Sun: “He should be stripped of all bonuses from his time as head of investment banking. Every single penny.
“It shows the cavalier attitude of RBS investment bankers and highlights the myth that these people are worth so much money.”
It is not known when the images were taken but some were posted to Instagram on Father’s Day last year saying: “Happy Father’s Day to the indisputable king of snapchat”, using the hashtag #daddylikestoselfie.
Mr Cullinan, who is in charge of restructuring the bank and has recently taken control of investments, took home a £4 million bonus this year, despite the publicly-owned bank announcing a £3.5 billion loss last month. He has been given shared worth £2.1 million.
TaxPayers’ Alliance chief Jonathan Isaby added: “After all the cash pumped in to RBS, the least you’d expect is that they’d pay attention.”
RBS refused to comment but a source close to Mr Cullinan said: “Rory was keeping in touch with his daughter during a break in meetings.
“This was a light-hearted exchange and does not reflect the seriousness in which he takes the job at hand.”
The Royal Bank of Scotland was bailed out by the taxpayer to the tune of £46billion in 2008 under the Labour government.
A persons Identity in today’s online world is becoming more transparent by the second. In the article above all Mr Cullinan did was send light hearted snapchats to a close family member and now this is being used against him publicly. Althoughsocial networking sights like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram are supposed to be used only for social networking purposes and in no way professional purposes they are often used as methods to find out more personal detail about a person. For all we knew those selfies were probably sent by him to his daughter to make her laugh and not actually reflect the way he felt. But I guess as someone with such a high standing it should have been his duty to be careful on any kind of a public standing. This reminded me of how Erving Goffman had (1959) theorized self-presentation as a performance; the need for a multiple, composite self has only increased since public communication moved to an online space. The Royal Bank of Scotland boss needs a multiple composite version of himself to represent or else only one transparent online identity that can be seen by everyone.
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