Hornby’s great escape

LET us forget for the moment the dubious merit of allowing establishment bookie Ladbrokes Coral to fall into the hands of Isle of Manbased online betting group GVC.

Both firms have been through a dizzying series of mergers, each promising synergies, most of which have still to be delivered. The history of business empires built on jagged, hurried deals is not a happy one.

One senior executive has passed seamlessly from Coral to Ladbrokes and is now proposed as chief operating officer of the merged gaming group.

Step forward the former wunderkind – Andy Hornby.

Money seems to follow him wherever he has gone in the years since he brought HBOS to its knees, causing anguish to the tens of thousands of Lloyds-HBOS employees who lost their jobs, and investors.

Hornby also was notionally at the helm during the large fraud and cover-up at HBOS’s Reading branch which ruined the lives of many small business customers and is still trundling its way through compensation claims and the courts.

Even if one were to accept that HBOS was an innocent victim of a global financial crisis, there can be no excuses for negligent senior management over the Reading fraud, which sent six people to jail for sentences totalling 47 years.

An official report into the failure of HBOS prepared by Alan Green QC two years ago noted that Hornby was under investigation with a view to possible prosecution.

None of this looks to have hurt our hero. After a brief spell as chief executive of Alliance Boots, principal investor Stefano Pessina dispensed with Hornby and he left with a payoff of £2.4m.

Since then he has worked out at Coral and then at merged Ladbrokes-Coral where he has accumulated share options worth £10m. Because Hornby will not be on the main board the terms of his new contract at GVC-Ladbrokes are not disclosed. We do know that Lloyds has an obligation to pay him a pension of £240,000 a year for the rest of his days.

Everyone, including Hornby, is allowed redemption and it is unacceptable that financial and regulatory justice has taken so long to deliver at HBOS.

But the scale of incompetence at HBOS and the harm done to ordinary citizens makes it shocking that he stills hold office in a quoted enterprise bringing disrepute to free market capitalism.

Rebooting Britain

THE Office for National Statistics has come rushing to the rescue after a helping of doom from Christine Lagarde.

The IMF managing director was so concerned about protecting her forecast that the Brexit vote would be ‘pretty bad, to very, very bad’ for the UK economy that she seems to have missed the real story.

The rebalancing of the economy as a result of sterling’s depreciation looks to be happening. In the third quarter of 2017 business investment has been revised up from 0.2pc to 0.5pc as consumer spending slipped. Instead of being a drag on the economy, trade is improving and the current account deficit has narrowed.

Output in the third quarter held at a 0.4pc increase but has been revised up for the second half of last year, so the economy is growing at a reasonable 1.7pc clip. At an annual rate, manufacturing is doing its best since 2011.

Looking ahead, the fourth quarter looks reasonably robust, with prospective GDP growth of 0.4pc to 0.5pc.

Household incomes, squeezed by inflation in 2017, should improve a bit in the new year as higher import prices drop away. Higher real earnings should fuel consumption and output.

The glass is definitely more than half-full.

Pension renegades

THE British arm of Toys R Us lives to see another day but that should not excuse the egregious behaviour of the ultimate owners, American private equity giants Bain, KKR and Vornado.

They sought to renege on their obligations to the group’s pension fund and it took some tough negotiating by the Pension Protection Fund to bring them into line.

But the truth is that the black hole of £30m and the buyout deficit of £93m is still far from being properly filled.

Having achieved the immediate goal of stabilising the company it is time that the pension regulators directly went after the rapacious billionaires hiding in their Manhattan apartments and on their yachts.