The long delays surrounding the report into failures at HBoS during the 2007/09 financial crisis will end on November 19, when the 500-page document will be published.
While the FCA would not divulge its contents, the report and accompanying papers are expected to reveal both internal failures within the bank and a critique of the regulatory environment at the time.
Accompanying the joint review by the Bank of England, the PRA and the FCA into the failure of Britain’s largest bank, now part of Lloyds bank, will be another report by independent lawyer, Andrew Green QC, into the former FSA’s enforcement actions following the failure.
Mr Green’s report will consider whether the 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 began the report into the failure of HBoS in September 2012, and it has taken more than three years to publish.
In July 2014 the FCA said it would be published by the end of the year, saying it was at the “Maxwellisation” stage, which means those mentioned in the report get a chance to view its contents. This was followed by an announcement in March this year that the report would be available before the general election.
However, in response to a freedom of information Act request before the election, the regulator confirmed that the report, following the conclusion of enforcement action against former head of corporate banking at HBoS Peter Cummings, did not even have a specific publication date.
Earlier this year, chairman of the Treasury select committee Andrew Tyrie asked the FCA and PRA to explain why there had been such as delay into the publication.
A letter dated 2 July 2015 from the PRA/FCA to Mr Tyrie said there had been a “need to source and consider more than 240,000 electronic documents and 330 hard-copy folders from FSA archives, and conduct more than 80 interviews”.
The letter, written by Andrew Bailey, deputy governor of the PRA, and Sir Brian Pomeroy, senior independent director at the FCA, also said the two bodies had to Maxwellise and re-Maxwellise, and obtain consent to publish confidential information.
Background
Last year, a 94-page parliamentary study blamed failures of management and regulation for the “disaster” that beset HBoS, citing the bank’s former chairman Lord Stevenson, its former chief executives James Crosby and Andy Hornby, and the FSA for serious management failings. The report described former chief executive James Crosby – also deputy chairman of the FSA until he resigned and handed back his knighthood in 2013 in the wake of the crisis – as the “architect of the strategy that set the course for disaster”.
Mr Hornby – who came top of his MBA class at Harvard – returned to business life in 2009 as chief executive of Alliance Boots. He is now chief operating officer of Gala Coral, and will hold the same senior role when its planned merger with Ladbrokes is finalised.
He keeps out of the public eye.
