Investigative pieces mainly published by BBC News, Sunday Herald and The Sunday Times -- as well as some blog posts by Ian Fraser which have not yet appeared in the mainstream media. Topics include wrongdoing at the failed UK bank HBOS.
March 2nd, 2010
Goldman Sachs likes to think of itself as being so smart it is invincible, but the truth is somewhat different. The New York-based investment bank would probably not be around today had it not been for the US government’s decision to bail out AIG in the panicked few days following Lehman Brothers’ collapse [...]
February 27th, 2010
HBOS’s entrance on The Mound; Image: The We
Lessons must be learnt from the short and calamitous history of HBOS, the bank which effectively went bust in September 2008 before having to be rescued by Lloyds TSB and the British government, writes Ian Fraser (Note: This article was first posted under the headline “HBOS: [...]
By Ian Fraser and Michael Tait
Published: The Mail on Sunday
Date: February 22nd, 2010
AN SNP donor whose ski resort went bust owing the taxpayer millions of pounds has been allowed to buy it back in a cut-price deal.
The Aviemore complex, which was jointly owned by Nationalist supporter Donald Macdonald, collapsed last summer.
The failure came despite First [...]
November 8th, 2009 (first published January 2009)
“No touch” regulator? John Tiner was the FSA’s boss from April 2001 to July 2007
One of the FSA’s main roles is supposedly to protect consumers from being ripped off by the crooks and charlatans of the financial world (where such ne’er-do-wells of course represent a tiny minority). But the [...]
By Ian Fraser
Published: Sunday Herald
Date: November 8th, 2009
The way some newspapers presented it, one might have thought that last Tuesday’s bank bail-out measures were a glorious victory.
Plucky British bankers and politicians had taken on Neelie Kroes and those meddling bureaucrats of Brussels and won, ensuring that great British institutions such as Royal Bank of Scotland [...]
By Ian Fraser
Published: Independent on Sunday
Date: November 8th, 2009
Just four months before its humiliating collapse into the arms of Lloyds, the bank’s chairman assured shareholders that it had sufficient funds for at least a year. How could he have got it so wrong? Ian Fraser reports
Lord Stevenson of Coddenham, the chairman of HBOS, strode excitedly [...]
By Ian Fraser and Margareta Pagano
Published: Independent on Sunday
Date: November 8th, 2009
A Financial Services Authority investigation into whether HBOS’s former board may have misled investors at the time of the bank’s abortive £4bn rights issue last year could “open the floodgates” to hundreds of civil court actions against Lloyds Banking Group, which acquired HBOS in [...]
November 6th, 2009 (first published as “Re-examining HBOS” on Sept 4th, 2009)
Bank of Scotland Corporate, a division of Lloyds Banking Group, has a dirty little secret. Its branch in Queens Road, Reading (Beauclerc House, pictured above) was for several years SME banking’s answer to Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison where US military personnel tortured and [...]
November 3rd, 2009 (first published June 9th, 2009)
A circa £925m* fraud involving Bank of Scotland Corporate, now part of Lloyds Banking Group, and the self-styled ‘turnaround consultancy’ Quayside Corporate Services, owned by David Mills, has caused scores of businesses across south-east England to go to the wall. The effected businesses subsequently had their assets [...]
Updated October 29th, 2009 (first published October 9th, 2009)
Lloyds Banking Group has been given the go-ahead to proceed with a £13.5bn rights issue as part of a wider capital-raising. Given their knowledge of the extent of the challenges facing the bank, were the tripartite authorities (the FSA, Bank of England and H.M. Treasury) well-advised to [...]