I was delighted to appear on the “A Long Time in Finance” podcast with the former City editors Jonathan Ford and Neil Collins, even though I had a bad cold at the time so my voice sounds a bit ropey.
The topic was what on earth has happened to the Dobbs Review, which Lloyds Banking Group commissioned from retired High Court Judge Dame Linda Dobbs in April 2017, but which has yet to see the light of day. The review process has already taken an astonishing seven years, and there’s still no sign of Dobbs’ final report.
Lloyds Banking Group appointed Dobbs in April 2017 aasking her to probe whether Lloyds Banking Group csought to bury or cover up the £1bn HBOS Reading fraud following its January 2009 acquisition of the deeply troubled Edinburgh-based bank. The danger of such an appoinment as Neil, Jonathan and I discuss in the episode, is that despite claims Dobbs’ review is “independent” is the bank is effectively “marking its own homework”.
Dobbs and her army of lawyers and PR advisers are focused on the period following Lloyds’ takeover of HBOS to the culmination of convictions of six of the individuals who perpetrated the fraud includng tow senior HBOS (Bank of Scotland Corporate) bank managers, Lynden Scourfield and Mark Dobson. So essentially she is looking at an eight year stretch from January 2009 to February 2017. In addition, Dobbs is examining “relevant evidence” from before 2009 to assess what Lloyds knew or should have known about what happened at HBOS Reading by the time of it sealed its takeoverof HBOS.
Back in April 2017, Dobbs expected the exercise to be finished in a ’matter of months’. More than seven years on, there’s still no sign of her reports. Indeed the Dobbs review threatens to rival some of the slowest official reports in British history – which have included the Saville inquiry into Bloody Sunday which took 12 years, and the Edinburgh trams inquiry which took nine years. The have been accusations it risks compounding the original alleged cover-up.
For background, the HBOS Reading fraud was something that I spent several years of my life exposing in 2008-12,. I have been told it was partly thanks to my articles, published in the Sunday Herald and elsewhere, that Thames Valley Police commenced their ’Operation Hornet’ investigation, which culminated in a five-month trial at Southwark Crown Court and six of the perpetrators being jailed for a combined 47 years in February 2017.
We covered a lot of ground in the podcast, including why Lloyds Banking Group chose to bury the fraud after acquiring HBOS in a rescue takeover in January 2009, as well as the enlarged bank’s shocking treatment of Lloyds Banking Group risk manager Sally Masterton, after she complied the damning but accurate Project Lord Turnbull report as well as its approach to compensating the many victims ofd the fraud (see also my Twitter thread on the Project Lord Turnbull report ands its significance.)
How the episode was described by A Long Time in Finance
“Employees of a High Street bank rip off its customers for years. The bank refuses to admit anything illegal happened. Yet when the fraud is finally exposed, it not only gets to decide what compensation to pay; it gets to investigate its own wrongdoing. Sound strange? We talk to the Ian Fraser about Lloyds and the HBOS Reading Affair, its parallels with the Post Office scandal and the world’s longest in-house investigation, under retired Judge Dame Linda Dobbs.”
