UK ‘regulators’ to publish report into HBOS collapse

LONDON, Nov 12, (RTRS): A longdelayed report into the collapse of British bank HBOS in the 2007-2009 financial crisis will be published on Nov 19, regulators said on Thursday.

The Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority’s joint review into the failure of HBOS, now part of Lloyds bank, will be accompanied by a report by an independent lawyer, Andrew Green, into the former Financial Services Authority’s enforcement actions following the failure.

Green has looked into whether former management of HBOS should face investigations and bans following criticism from lawmakers that the FSA did too little to call former bosses to account.

The FSA was disbanded in a post-crisis shake-up of finance industry supervision, its functions split between the Bank of England and the new FCA.

HBOS, Britain’s biggest mortgage lender, had to be rescued via a government-engineered takeover by rival Lloyds, which subsequently needed a 20 billion pound ($30.46 billion) bailout.

Publication of the report has been delayed because regulators said they had to wait for enforcement proceedings against Peter Cummings, HBOS head of corporate lending until it was bought by Lloyds, to be completed before work on the review could start.

Cummings, the only HBOS official to face enforcement proceedings, was fined half a million pounds and given a lifetime industry ban in 2012, a ruling he called unfair and sinister.

A parliamentary report published in 2013 found that although regulators bore some of the blame, primary responsibility for the “colossal failure” of HBOS lay with its chairman Dennis Stevenson and former chief executives James Crosby and Andy Hornby.

The lawmakers had asked regulators to consider if Stevenson, Crosby and Hornby should be barred from the industry, a task they delegated to Green.

In 2013, Hornby surrendered 30 percent of his pension from HBOS and asked the British authorities to remove the knighthood he received just after he left the bank.