According to the television executive Michael Grade non-executive directors are like bidets – no-one is sure what exactly they are for, but they add a touch of class.
Tag: HBOS Page 1 of 2
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.
Shareholders in Lloyds and RBS will get their day in court. That will at least enable them to vent their frustrations and further expose the stupidity of the boards and executives who presided over the catastrophic drops in the value of their investments, but both actions are likely to result in pyrrhic victories.
Could the HBOS three finally get an official slap on the wrist for losing £54 billion, forcing the Government to rescue the bank and impoverishing millions of bank employees and small shareholders?
On the day that Robert Peston breaks news of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards draft report, I’m on my way to speak to an interesting group of bankers in Dublin. Questions sent in advance may whet the appetite for tonight’s dinner.
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?
We now know what the price of failure is for the CEO of a wrecked bank. Fred Goodwin at RBS set the tariff: a lost knighthood and a third off the pension. Now James Crosby at HBOS has fallen into line. But what should happen to the chairmen?
The Parliamentary Commission report repays careful reading, not least for its strident criticism of the board and their habit of self-congratulation rather than rigorous challenge.
The significance of the HBOS report from the Parliamentary Commission is not in any new evidence it has uncovered – we always knew why the bank went bust – but in the uncompromising way in which it named the men primarily responsible for bringing it down, chairman Lord Stevenson and chief executives Sir James Crosby and Andy Hornby.
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.