HBOS
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Bank of England non-execs – you can’t even use them to wash your socks
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.
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Class actions likely to end in pyrrhic victories for Lloyds & RBS shareholders
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.
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Was HBOS an ethical bank?
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.
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Time for TSB to come home to Scotland?
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?
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Time for Stevenson to drop his air of injured innocence: he was as much to blame as Crosby
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?
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The role of bank boards needs to be reassessed
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.
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The guilty have been named. Now they must be punished
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…
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A touch of class?
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.