By Ian Fraser Published: The Sunday Times Date: April 26th, 2009 An accountant from the bank’s insurance arm says there was a woeful lack of supervision HBOS under former chief executive Sir James Crosby was “dangerously out of control” with a sloppy attitude towards expenses and financial supervision, according to a whistleblower who was sacked [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: January 25th, 2009 Call for probe into ‘favourable gloss’ on finances. By Ian Fraser A FORMER Bank of Scotland senior executive has called for a Financial Services Authority investigation into misleading information put out by the board of HBOS at the time of its ill-fated £4 billion rights [...]
By Ian Fraser and Ben Laurance Published: The Daily Mail Date: January 24th, 2009 BANKERS who engineered the catastrophic takeover deal that brought Royal Bank of Scotland to its knees have received multi-million-pound bonuses for the disastrous transaction, it has emerged. The man who led the team advising RBS in spearheading a £50 billion takeover [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: November 30th, 2008 BUSINESS customers of HBOS’s Bank of Scotland Corporate division in Southeast England claim that a former bank manager working alongside Quayside Corporate Services jeopardised their businesses – which in many cases went to the wall. Business customers from across Southeast England were referred to the [...]
By Paul Hutcheon and Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: November 29th, 2008 MPs demand answers over role of consultant and actions of sacked Bank of Scotland executive Investigation by Paul Hutcheon and Ian Fraser HALIFAX Bank of Scotland (HBOS) is refusing to explain why it used two businessmen with a history of misappropriating company funds to offer financial [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: The Sunday Times Date: October 19th, 2008 Furious investors who claim they were badly advised about the enhanced fund may lose millions Thousands of Britain’s wealthiest investors, including an Edinburgh-based international entrepreneur of the year, risk losing as much as one-quarter of what they put into a “low-risk” money market fund [...]
By Ian Fraser Sunday Herald October 12th, 2008 Accountants of failed banks missed ‘red flags’. By Ian Fraser THE FINGER of blame for the crisis that has crippled global financial markets in recent days has been pointed in many directions. Over the past few months, regulators, central banks, banks, ratings agencies and even consumers themselves [...]
By Ian Fraser Sunday Herald September 28th, 2008 IT WAS presented as a fait accompli. On Thursday September 18, at 7am, both Sir Victor Blank and his American sidekick, Eric Daniels, looked like the cats that had got the cream. The chairman and chief executive of Lloyds TSB, who were later seen alongside a more [...]
By Ian Fraser Sunday Herald June 8th, 2008 ECONOMIC slowdown is normally the last thing that business wants. But for Ireland’s £1 trillion international asset-servicing industry, a cooling-off seems almost welcome. AS NEXT week’s knife-edge vote on the Lisbon Treaty forces one of the Republic’s periodic reflective bouts, the Irish financial sector – which rose from nothing in the early 1990s to employ [...]
By Ian Fraser European Fund Manager December 20th, 2007 130/30 funds are suddenly all the rage. But is the surge in such funds a response to client demand or do fund managers have other motives? Ian Fraser investigates BARELY a week passes these days without some traditional fund management group or other jumping onto the [...]