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 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 was [...]
January 19th, 2012 Another whistleblower has emerged from inside 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 directors to [...]
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 [...]
Blog post revised and retitled October 3rd, 2010 A fourth person has been arrested in relation to Thames Valley Police’s investigation into “corruption and large-scale fraud in connection with HBOS”. [Note: comments on this post have now been disabled and earlier comments from witnesses have been removed as a result of the police investigation "Operation [...]
July 29th, 2010 Am I alone in finding the “For the journey” television commercials for Lloyds TSB (early example above) nauseating? I would dislike these ads whichever brand they were for. But the fact they’re for Lloyds — a brand which like BP has become somewhat toxic of late — makes me want to throw [...]
February 26th, 2010 Lloyds Banking Group, AKA “the most hated bank in Britain“, today unveiled higher-than-expected annual losses of £6.3bn. The Gresham Street-based bank also admitted that bad debts, largely arising from the poisonous legacy of Peter Cummings, HBOS’s former head of corporate lending, soared to £24bn in 2009. As BBC economics correspondent Hugh Pym pointed out [...]
December 2nd, 2009 Sir Win Bischoff, the chairman of Lloyds Banking Group and a past chairman of US bank Citigroup, is clearly a man who is easily misled. In December 2008, soon after Citigroup was bailed out by US taxpayers — from whom it received a $306bn ‘undisguised gift’ last autumn — Bischoff signed off [...]
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 roles is supposed to be to protect consumers from being ripped off by crooks and charlatans in the financial world. But the City regulator has in recent times had [...]