Bank takeovers should face deeper scrutiny and directors should be more accountable for their actions, Britain’s finance watchdog said in a long-awaited report on the near collapse of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Reuters reported.

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) said today in a 452-page report that RBS managers, including former CEO Fred Goodwin, were most at fault in the bank’s brush with bankruptcy, which was averted by a $70 billion government bailout in 2008.

The regulator, which is due to be broken up next year with much of its responsibilities returning to the Bank of England, was also critical of its own actions and of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown for encouraging a “light touch” regulatory regime.

The report, like earlier investigations, said there was no prospect of successful legal action against former RBS executives as there was no evidence of criminal wrongdoing, although they had made a series of bad decisions.

But it said they still could be disqualified from being directors in the future, pending a decision by the government, and suggested the law could be changed.

The FSA said banks should face closer scrutiny of their takeover plans. It identified RBS’s highly-leveraged 16-billion-euro purchase of parts of Dutch bank ABN AMRO in 2007, just before a financial markets meltdown, as its biggest mistake.