It is seven years since the collapse of HBOS – the second largest collapse in British banking history (after RBS) and one which cost the UK taxpayer £20 billion, Lloyds and former HBOS shareholders £54 billion and 40,000 bank employees their jobs.
Category: Lloyds
I’m told the extremely tardy official report into the collapse of HBOS will be published early in the New Year and will contain criticism of the former chairman, Lord Stevenson, and chief executive, Andy Hornby. Whether it also imposes sanctions is another matter.
There now looks to be a more than even chance that we taxpayers will get back the money we pumped into Lloyds to prevent it going bust after the disastrous takeover of HBOS in 2008-9.
It’s time to stop talking about mis-selling and give the activity its proper name – fraud.
After the Co-operative Bank pulled out, Lloyds is now to launch 632 branches as a standalone business on the stock market. Could there be an opportunity here for Scotland to regain a bank headquarters?
Is George Osborne planning a pre-election give-away funded by the sale of shares in Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland?
Newspapers made great play on the rewriting of history by Eric Daniels, former Chief Executive of Lloyds, last week, when he appeared to backtrack on his statement that the takeover of HBOS had been done with inadequate due diligence.
Bizarrely Lloyds Banking Group has bought back into one of the companies it sold when it unloaded the former HBOS integrated finance portfolio in a £480 million deal in 2010.
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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. |