February 27th, 2010 (updated May 13th, 2012) 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, writes Ian Fraser (Note: This article was first posted under the headline “HBOS: When did the rot set in? [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: May 6th, 2012 It was supposed to be Scotland’s safe bank. What went wrong? By Ian Fraser Call it Cameron Clyne’s ‘Derby’ moment. At a council of war in that East Midlands city in 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie had to concede that weak generalship, poor logistics and limited support [...]
April 16th, 2012 In this speech the economist and author John Kay examined how the financial sector continues to make — or claims to make — returns-on-equity which are way in excess of any reasonable estimate of cost of capital. Kay, a visiting professor at London School of Economics, examined various possible reasons but then focused on [...]
March 13th, 2012 You couldn’t make this up. Given the shocking way in which Bank of Scotland treats its customers – and particularly how it and parent company Lloyds Banking Group have treated the former business customers whose lives and companies have been destroyed as a result of the bank’s £1 billion plus ”Reading Fraud” of 2003-08 [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: February 26th, 2012 Results released last Friday showed a sea of red ink engulfing the state-rescued Lloyds Banking Group. Trumpeted at the time of its September 2008 formation as the “bank for Britain”, the 41%-taxpayer owned business unveiled annual losses of £3.5 billion for 2011, nearly double those [...]
By Ian Fraser Published: Sunday Herald Date: February 12th, 2012 From the perspective of its head office in Melbourne’s Bourke Street, National Australia Bank’s UK subsidiaries Clydesdale Bank and Yorkshire Bank are looking increasingly like dead weights at the moment. The Australian economy, where the Victoria-based bank has the bulk of its operations, is booming and [...]
January 31st, 2012 The man who destroyed the Bank of Scotland with a reckless and seemingly out-of-control corporate and real-estate lending spree is in the media again. Mortgage Strategy has an article (Living in the age of less reason) which touches on the “pig on pork” or integrated finance model favoured by Peter Cummings, who [...]
January 19th, 2012 Another whistleblower has emerged from the bowels of Lloyds Banking Group with well-documented evidence of illegal sales practices in the bank’s retail arm. Ex-Army officer and former UBS and Towry Law executive Ian Taplin was fired by Lloyds in August 2010 after he sought to alert its senior management and board of [...]
June 26th, 2011 The patience of António Horta-Osório, the Portuguese-born boss of Lloyds Banking Group, appears to be wearing thin. According to a comment piece in the Sunday Telegraph, the former Goldman Sachs and Santander banker has pleaded with executives from Lloyds and the former HBOS to stop hiding the truth from him. The paper’s [...]
October 11th, 2010 BBC Scotland’s Trust Me I’m A Banker will be aired on BBC1 Scotland at 7.30pm tonight. I was interviewed for the programme on whether the Graeme Shankland / Bank of Scotland Integrated Finance deal — which saw the ownership of a troublesome private equity portfolio amassed by HBOS at the peak of [...]