The Prudential has told Compliance Matters that it is still not willing to talk about the likelihood that Clive Adamson, who resigned the headship of supervision at the Financial Conduct Authority in controversial circumstances, will have a job there.

The story about Clive Adamson accepting a position at the Pru, perhaps as a non-executive director, surfaced a few days ago in City AM, the London commuter's paper.

It was in December that the FCA’s head of supervision announced that he had decided to leave the FCA. There had for some time been much speculation in the compliance press about Adamson’s forthcoming departure, mainly concerning the question of how he had been able to stay in his post for so long after the 'insurance share apocalypse' that cast a shadow on his remaining time at the FCA.

It was on 27 March last year that the London Daily Telegraph published price-sensitive information it had obtained from the FCA, quoting Adamson extensively. It reported that the FCA was planning an inquiry into 30 million policies that insurance companies had sold between the 1970s and the year 2000. The headline was “Savers locked into rip-off pensions and investors may be free to exit, regulators will say.” The next day, insurance shares plunged. The next week, Adamson, as would not have been the case at a regulated firm, still had his job.

Andrew Tyrie MP, the Chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, said of the scandal in which Adamson figured prominently: “The FCA has fallen well below the standards it requires of the firms it regulates...the body comprising the UK listing authority, in premeditated briefing, created a false market - causing considerable market uncertainty, worry for many consumers and some lasting damage.”

Adamson was also instrumental in one of the most disastrous regulator-approved appointments of all time – that of the Rev Paul Flowers, the ‘Crystal Methodist’ who mismanaged the Co-Op Bank while on ketamine. In January last year Adamson, who had signed off on the appointment that brought chaos to the bank, was still insisting that he had done nothing wrong. He admitted that it was obvious that Flowers had had no banking experience before his appointment in 2010 but added, by way of explanation: "With the benefit of hindsight, yes I do think we got it wrong, but it was the right decision at the time.”

Regulators discovered a capital hole of £1½ billion at the Co-op in 2013. Andrew Tyrie’s comment was: “Regulatory approval for those running banks now appears to include a requirement for some degree of financial expertise. It is scarcely credible that this was not already the case.”