I’m not the only one who went through hell. Toxic banks have wrecked thousands of lives
NOEL: Evil bankers cost me £300m and drove me to a drug overdose
who saw last week’s paper. Mr Tomlinson’s Government-commissioned report in 2013 exposed the unfair treatment of business customers by RBS and he is dropping by this afternoon to discuss my fight with Lloyds.
Tomorrow, I’m off to Oxford to meet representatives of Thames Valley Police and hand over docu- mentation about my case, and to supply additional HBOS/ Lloyds’ names for their ongoing investigation, Operation Hornet.
It had already been an exhausting week. Yet just when I was about to take the dog for a long, relaxing walk, there was another startling development. An email arrived, followed by a phone chat and then a hastily arranged four-hour meeting at my home with the owner of the most explosive evidence I’ve seen. I’ve seen bundles of documents, which leave me in absolutely no doubt that the banking malpractices which wrecked thousands of lives were not confined to a single rogue unit in HBOS Reading, but extend much further and for a lot longer.
The harsh reality, which makes me very sad and extremely concerned for our nation’s future, is that for many years huge numbers of small to medium-sized UK busi- nesses have been systematically pillaged by many of our largest banks – banks that are now too big to fail and too big to regulate, run by former executives who apparently believe they are too big to jail.
A spokesman for Lloyds Banking Group s ai d: ‘ We are making progress with providing compensation to customers affected by the criminal misconduct of those convicted in relation to HBOS Reading. Where we have customer input we have been able to assess nearly all of these cases and provide compensation offers. We have provided offers to nearly half of all customers in the review, and in more than 50 per cent of such cases the offers have been accepted and paid.’