Chris Blackhurst: HBOS verdict has been undermined by time-wasting tactics

Tomorrow, finally, the waiting will be over. And I mean waiting.

That’s when we get the report by the Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority into the collapse of HBOS in September 2008.

More than seven years later, we will be able to read criticism of the bank’s former bosses: chairman Lord Stevenson and chief executives James Crosby and Andy Hornby.

Will they be fined? No. Unless there is a new development, they will escape financial punishment because the regulators did not warn them of any enforcement action before the statute of limitations expired and that period ran out six years after the event, in 2014.

Only in Britain. Only in a nation that includes supposedly the world’s greatest financial centre, that prides itself on selling its upright behaviour and thorough banking oversight to everyone else, could such stupidity occur.

Here we are, long after this country and others were almost brought to their knees by the greed and reckless activities of the banks, and only one banker has ever been penalised. He was Peter Cummings and he ran HBOS’s corporate division.

Cummings signed off £26 billion of bad loans that led to the bank’s £20 billion bailout by Lloyds.

For that he received a lifetime ban and a fine of £500,000 from the then Financial Services Authority.

But Cummings did not act alone. He did not work in a vacuum. He did not manage the bank. He had chiefs and reporting lines.

They, presumably, approved of what he was doing. They went along with his “culture of aggressive growth”, as the Financial Services Authority, predecessor watchdog to the Financial Conduct Authority, described it. Indeed, as we’re likely to discover tomorrow, they may even have set him performance targets.

In the good times, too, when Cummings’ operation was responsible for as much as 40% of the bank’s total profits, they shared in his success.

I feel sorry for Cummings. I spoke to him when he was in his pomp and he was banker to the likes of Sir Philip Green.

He earned a fortune by most people’s standards, and when he left the bank in January 2009 he walked away with a £6 million pension pot.

So that’s not where my sympathy lies — he’s still, I would imagine, got loads of money.

But the only banker to have been punished? And this, don’t forget, applies to all the banks that collapsed, not just HBOS. It’s ridiculous and shaming.

The HBOS Three were extricated from a similar fate because the report took so long to complete. Why? Largely because they and others, together with ranks of lawyers, fell back upon “Maxwellisation”.

The report’s authors have spent the last 18 months dealing with 1,500 representations from 35 individuals cited in the draft document. Not only that, they had to “re-Maxwellise” those who, because of changes being made to the report, faced increased criticism.

So the tedious and expensive process went on, backwards and forwards.

It’s the same one that has seen the Chilcot inquiry into the origins of the Iraq war drag on at interminable length. And all because of a crook called Robert Maxwell.

Most of us have no time for the old Mirror pensions robber. But in clubland and country house parlours, where those who drive our institutions, be they political or financial, gather, there must be the occasional raising of a fine glass or two in thanks.

His lawyers argued that the 1971 Department of Trade and Industry report denouncing Maxwell as not “a person who can be relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company” was unfair.

They said he hadn’t had the opportunity to respond, a High Court judge agreed, and anyone criticised since in a public inquiry has been able to maintain they should be informed in advance of its proposed conclusions and given enough time to dispute them.