Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the UK financial regulation myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The UK financial watchdog has decided to start deleting many emails a year after it receives them, raising concerns among staff and campaigners that it could frustrate efforts to hold the regulator to account.The Financial Conduct Authority told staff last week it would start automatically deleting emails that remained in their inbox for more than 12 months unless they were considered important enough to be saved in its data repositories.A notice on the regulator’s intranet page said the new policy “reduces the legal and reputational risk we face” and would start on April 1, according to an employee.They added that concerns had been raised internally about how the change would affect responses to Freedom of Information Act requests and potential future investigations of the FCA’s conduct.The FCA said in an emailed statement that the change was “about deleting unnecessary emails, which means we will be able to retrieve information more efficiently”. “Any emails that should be retained to comply with regulatory and legal requirements, including the Freedom of Information Act, will be saved,” it said.The policy would only apply to emails sent or received after April 1, so older emails should not be automatically deleted, the regulator added.Campaigners said the automatic deletion of emails that are not considered important risked hampering probes into the FCA that often rely on historic email exchanges with the regulator.“If it transpires that the FCA is attempting to delete emails over 12 months old, then those who believe the FCA to be dishonest will wonder if their motivation for doing so is to cover up dishonesty; and if so there could be one or more scandals that it is trying to hide its handling of,” said Andy Agathangelou, head of campaign group Transparency Task Force.FCA staff are being trained on the policy to make them aware of which emails need to be stored under the Financial Services and Markets Act. Any information created or received in the course of discharging its regulatory duties must be stored for 25 years.The regulator requires the companies it regulates to keep their records for a minimum period of time — at least five years for investment companies subject to market rules, indefinitely for pension transfer specialists and three years for other companies.However, the FCA’s policy on disclosing information is already under scrutiny after the Financial Times reported last month that an internal review had found that it failed to follow FOI rules in 2020 by “inappropriately” delaying responses to requests for months.Ashley Alder, FCA chair, was also criticised last year after he was found to have broken its rules on disclosing the identity of two internal whistleblowers by sharing emails from them with colleagues.
