Fay
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Stay angry and stay tuned to HBOS hearing on Parliament TV
In case my banging on about Hornby and Stevenson is not setting the heather on fire…remember that they were among top executives who left HBOS with 6 figure redundancy payments and large pension funds while more than 40,000 employees lost their jobs and 2 million small shareholders lost their life savings. To say nothing of…
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The Life of Brian
At Lennoxlove Book Festival I was asked if I was working on a follow-up book on the Royal Bank. I would like to but Ian Fraser, financial journalist, blogger and tireless tweeter has beaten me to it. What promises to be the definitive account of Scotland’s other great banking disaster will be published by Birlinn…
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Question the organ grinders – not just the monkeys
The Financial Times reports that the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards has started an inquiry into the 2008 collapse of HBOS. It will call former executives as witnesses and plans for the first time to use legal counsel to cross-examine them.
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The FSA can’t be allowed to get away with this
Am I just too cynical? The Independent confirms what I have been told, that the Financial Services Authority’s report into its own policing of HBOS before the crash will not appear before next summer. By then it will be five years and more after some of the crucial events and too late. The FSA will be…
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Are we funding another round of losses?
Surely history teaches us that given freedom, banks will either do something stupid (125%, self-certified and buy-to-let mortgages), evil (manipulating LIBOR) or both (Payment Protection Insurance.)
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Up or down? Crosby bails out of Edinburgh property market.
James Crosby, the man who bailed out as Chief Executive of HBOS in 2006 – two years before the crash – seems to be about to bail out of the Edinburgh property market too, although on this occasion his timing does not look so fortuitous.
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Has Nemesis finished her work?
The small shareholders on both sides of the Atlantic trying to sue Lloyds over the disastrous takeover of the bankrupt HBOS in 2009 will be encouraged by the settlement reached by Bank of America, which was facing similar action over its rescue of Merrill Lynch.
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Peter Cummings was not alone: FSA must do better than this
What is amazing about the FSA judgement on Peter Cummings is not that they fined him £500,000 or banned him from financial services – as the man who presided over the HBOS corporate banking department responsible for the lion’s share of the losses some might think he got off lightly – but that no-one else…
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Hubris: How HBOS Wrecked the Best Bank in Britain
In 1995 Bank of Scotland celebrated 300 years as Britain’s oldest commercial bank. Voted ‘most admired bank’, respected by competitors, applauded by investors and trusted by customers, it looked forward to the next three hundred. Less than 15 years later it was bust, reviled as part of the spectacular collapse of HBOS, the conglomerate it…
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The Man Who Gave Away His Island
The Man Who Gave Away His Island by Ray Perman is the biography of a remarkable man, John Lorne Campbell, who bought the Hebridean island of Canna and, with his American musician wife Margaret Fay Shaw, made it an international centre of Gaelic culture. Ray fell in love with Canna on his first visit in…