During this time, Sigismund sent out daily and monthly internal newsletters to FCA employees on his findings. By 2014, the tribunal said he was in daily, personal email communication with the FCA's chief executive at the time, Martin Wheatley.
At the end of 2013, Sigismund was seconded to the chief economist’s department but still produced work on the 'Harm Metric'. In March 2015, he was instructed to stop work on it entirely - though this decision was never recorded in writing.
An internal audit had found Sigismund’s metric “lacked proper explanations”, that he “ignored legal realities and misunderstood aspects of regulation”. It also suggested the FCA should have a review process in place to validate models “as early as possible” so as not to spend time and resources on models which are not going to be used in the long run.
Two academics also reviewed it, both agreeing it was nowhere near being fully formulated for regulatory use.
Sigismund was then moved from the chief economist’s department to work on peer-to-peer lending.
Sigismund’s ‘lack of perspective’ and clarity
In its analysis of how Sigismund communicated his 'Harm Metric', the tribunal found he both "lack[ed] perspective" and that his relationship with one manager "was not an easy one".
In an email sent in November 2010, Sigismund had likened himself to Moses and “Galileo trying to explain that actually the earth goes around the sun” when describing how he felt trying to communicate his data with FCA supervisors.
He added in a later witness statement that Galileo "was tried by the inquisition, found ‘vehemently suspect of heresy’ and forced to recant" before spending the rest of his life under house arrest.
“At the FSA and FCA, I often thought of them and my isolation and similar house arrest and treatment," he said.
The tribunal said comparisons of his own treatment with that of Galileo, and the reference to being subjected to house arrest, appeared to disclose “a concerning lack of perspective”.
Sigismund also wrote to former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, as well as former chancellor Philip Hammond, in January 2019 saying “I arguably deserve a Nobel prize" in reference to his metric which he had, by then, been claiming had long been ignored by his peers at the FCA.
Four years prior to this, upon Wheatley’s departure from the FCA in 2015, Sigismund applied for the top role at the regulator. He had also applied to become the next governor of the Bank of England in September 2012, a role for which he was not interviewed.
