Royal Bank of Scotland, part of NatWest Group, is facing a High Court claim of around £250 million from the liquidators of two collapsed Rockfire companies, who allege the bank processed unauthorised payments that drained investment vehicles tied to one of the largest local-authority financial failures in recent British history. NatWest says it will defend the claims.
The liquidators have brought two claims: Rockfire Capital is pursuing roughly £70 million, and Rockfire Investment Finance about £179 million plus interest. Their case is that RBS breached its duties by allowing suspicious payments to leave the companies’ accounts as they slid towards insolvency, so that money which should have been preserved for creditors was instead dissipated.
The claim against the bank
At the heart of the liquidators’ case is the question of what a bank must do when payment patterns look wrong. They allege RBS failed to detect and block payments it should have queried — a theory that echoes the line of English authority on a bank’s duty to guard against the misappropriation of its customer’s funds. Whether RBS owed and breached such a duty on these facts, and whether that caused the losses claimed, will be central issues.
The Thurrock backdrop
The Rockfire collapse is bound up with the finances of Thurrock Council, which invested close to £400 million in Rockfire renewable-energy bonds between 2017 and 2020. In December 2022 the council declared itself effectively bankrupt, with debts reaching around £1.5 billion — a failure that became a national cautionary tale about local-authority investment in complex commercial vehicles. The money the liquidators are now chasing sits at the centre of that story.
A parallel claim and an SFO investigation
The bank claim runs alongside a separate High Court action by Thurrock Council against former Rockfire director Liam Kavanagh, seeking to recover about £150 million the council alleges was diverted to personal purchases rather than the solar infrastructure the bonds were meant to fund. Mr Kavanagh strenuously denies the allegations. The Serious Fraud Office has opened a formal investigation into Rockfire Investment Finance and issued section 2 notices compelling financial institutions to produce records — a sign of how far the matter has escalated beyond the civil courts.
Why the banking-duty question matters
For banks, the claim is a reminder that transaction-monitoring failures can translate into direct liability to a customer’s creditors, not just regulatory censure. The more a court is willing to expect a bank to interrogate unusual payment activity, the greater the exposure when funds are later found to have been misappropriated. Cases like this test where that line sits — and how much a bank must do before a payment instruction can simply be honoured.
What it means for banks and their advisers
However the Rockfire claims resolve, they underline the litigation risk sitting inside payments and monitoring functions. For in-house and banking counsel, the practical themes are familiar but sharpened: the robustness of suspicious-activity controls, the documentation of decisions to process or hold payments, and the interplay between civil claims, insolvency office-holders and a live SFO investigation. With NatWest defending and the underlying facts still to be tested, the case is one the banking sector will follow closely.
