Right and Wrong

Leading romantic poet, army officer and popular spokesman for Roman Emperor Augustus Quintus Horatius Flaccus once said, “A portion of mankind takes pride in their vices and pursues their purpose; many more waver between doing what is right and complying with what is wrong” and little illustrates this more effectively than the current relationship between the government, the banks, their regulators and their victims.

Paralysed by potential for further unfavourable economic consequence, our government remains malleable in the hands of our unprosecutable banksters.  Discretely exploring “The Bank Confiscation Scheme for UK and US Depositors” to cover future bank bailouts, their mantra is forgive and forget in the name of economic recovery and their course is set for redirecting both the blame and the costs of the crisis onto the shoulders of the most vulnerable. Insisting the bankers lucrative history of over-zealous incentivising is merely misguided rather than criminal , our politcians and regulators have used smoke and mirrors to conceal the full extent of the banksters crimes (many of which have yet to immerge) hoping they will pass unnoticed by the silent and unsuspecting majority.

Before taking up office, David Cameron famously said, "We all know, in our hearts, that as long as there is deep poverty living systematically side by side with great riches, we all remain the poorer for it" yet this week, as a direct result of banker bailouts, “an avalanche of benefit cuts will hit the same households over and over, with no official assessment of how far this £18bn reduction will send those who are already poor, into beggary”. In contrast, financial regulators repeatedly excusing corporate criminality on the governments instruction have failed to persuade those who reaped their illicit rewards, without prosecution, to employ moral fiber to tailor their future. As a result, a culture of entitlement for failure lives on amongst the very people whose avarice sentenced millions to a lifetime of hardship.

• Libor rigging at Barclays has not thwarted the 39 million pounds received in bonuses this year, 17.5 million of which is to be received by just nine individuals.
• The money laundering of 881 million dollars for the drug trade has not resulted in a single prosecution at HSBC or at any other bank for that matter.
• Neither has sleeping at the Financial Services Authority wheel cost chief executive officer Hector Sants his knighthood.

And nor have

• HBOS, the worst bank in the world, who have refused to answer all further correspondence from me, seen fit to furnish me with the information I ask of them via my Data Subject Access Request.

I have, however received word from my newly appointed Financial Ombudsman Service adjudicator who informs he is (at long last I might add) looking forward to securing a response to my HBOS miss selling case from...

Santander!?

Quintus Horatius Flaccus also said, “It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar - that I call an achievement” and if lip service to banking reform and the reams of meaningless correspondence I have regularly had the misfortune to receive from both Halifax Bank of Scotland and the Financial Ombudsman Service is anything to go by, 

I find that Quintus Horatius Flaccus is definitely not wrong!! 

Unlevel Playing Fields

Philosopher, lawyer and political theorist Marcus Tullius Cicero once said, “When government becomes powerful it is destructive, extravagant and violent, it is a userer which takes bread from innocent mouths and deprives honourable men of their substance, for votes with which to perpetuate itself” and using austerity measures to redress the fraudulence of the banks and the greed of the corporate elite does precisely the same.

Those who would have us believe “we are all in this together” insisted,

• Bank bailouts would protect shareholders, help home owners and preserve jobs
• Bankers would use tax payers support to bolster the economy
• Official enquiries would hold those responsible to account
• Government guidelines and financial regulation would protect the vulnerable

However, during almost five years of economic crisis,

• Bailouts continue to save the bankers and not their customers or the economy
• Taxpayer investment provided funds for mis-selling reinbursement and rewards for failure
• FSA investigations held no-one to account bar a few insignificant fines
• Job losses and austerity measures reduced the incomes of the vulnerable and left them stripped of their homes

Before the crisis of 2008 those daring to suggest deregulated, reckless lending would come home to roost were labelled incompetents and lunatics. Four years later, as a direct result of bailout related austerity measures, cut backs dictate my eighty six year old mother cannot receive an attendance allowance unless she has been unable to manage her personal care for more than six months and her GP tells me he is unable to admit her to hospital unless he can secure funding for her treatment with ultra sound evidence for which the waiting list is six to eight weeks. Struggling to address her medical emergency along with her future care while unsuccessfully pressing HBOS to investigate my long overdue complaint, it beggars belief to find our banksters, who to date have remained largely unchallenged, are once again deliberating over how best to pocket obscene rewards for their gargantuan failures while the vulnerable and the innocent pay the price for years to come.

For the vast majority David Cameron’s “aspiration nation” is far from a shiny new goal for our economic future but instead a harsh and painful consequence of our bankers wicked past. After decades of unregulated pillaging, banks have bequeathed us a legacy of cut backs and cover ups and because of this, a few much loved but often fanciful aspirations are all a great many of us now have left. Marcus Tullius Cicero also said, “If the truth were self evident, eloquence would be unnecessary” and despite what some would have us believe, the playing field in this financial crisis is definitely not level however eloquently it is portrayed.

No Change of Circumstance

US president, Ronald Reagan once said, “Governments view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves tax it. If it keeps moving regulate it. And if it stops moving subsidise it” however if this is indeed the economic philosophy of the UK government too there is clearly a great deal of latitude in its interpretation as, to date, “if it keeps moving regulate it” has yet to register on the banking reform To Do list while “if it stops moving subsidise it” has only been applicable if it further strengthens the position (and the power) of the banksters.

For the vast majority of us, economic crisis has meant a 3% decline in wages (in real terms) but, despite being the villains in the mix, the banking elite have enjoyed a very different outcome. Instead of wage cuts and austerity measures they have enjoyed both tax breaks and subsidies along with a very respectable 37% increase in their remuneration packages while “ New Few”  have basked in an even more astounding 49% increase on 2010 earnings amounting to more than 900 times that of an average wage packet. 

David Cameron may wish us to believe we are all “in this together” but good sense dictates we are most definitely not and where Obama’s “settlement” to rescue homeowners with underwater mortgages has admittedly fallen foul of state governors discretionary powers to use these funds to prop up their deficits, our UK government has paid lip service to justice for the victims of banking fraud and instead sold on shortfall debt arising from RBS repossessions to replenish the coffers depleted by bank bailouts while repeatedly turning a blind eye to the crimes of the banking elite.

As the gap widens between the rich and the poor and irresponsible banking continues to go both unpunished and unregulated, it is only the Icelandic government who appear to have addressed the distress of the individual.  Debt forgiveness of residential mortgages over 110% of their 2008 valuations has not only played a huge part in rescuing their economy but it has saved a large proportion of their householders too. However, in the UK oligarchs continue to rule our politicians, reports of banking fraud continue to fall on deaf ears and as a result those of us with Bank of Scotland created mortgage shortfalls can only look forward to endless years of persecution born out of widespread regulatory lethargy and banking avarice.

British writer, novelist, columnist, Conservative Party politician and 3rd Baronet, Sir William Robert Ferdinand Mount says, “Britain will begin to heal its divisions only when oligarchs and their opposite, the poor, are reconnected to the rest of the society, so that the first are no longer seen as uncontrollable and the second as irredeemable”. Unfortunately, for the less than affluent individual this is unlikely to become a government directive because, if my own HBOS experience is anything to go by, the government along with our errant bankers have one fundamental viewpoint in common.

They believe, because they are all in it together, the individuals who makes up the 99% simply do not count.

Sink or Swim

In the mid 1800’s American activist, journalist and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison said, “You cannot possibly have a broader base for government than that which includes all the people with all their rights and with an equal power to maintain their rights.” He was speaking in support of the emancipation of slaves at the time and, although I do not pretend to claim the banking crisis is equal in abhorrence to the plight of the twelve million Africans who were sold into slavery between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, there are definitely parallels.

Like the slave traders, there are a number of bankers worldwide who have pursued personal gain with no regard for the pain and suffering levied on others. When those enslaved by debt could no longer afford their mortgages, often as result of austerity related job losses, these bankers threw them out of their homes along with their families without a backward glance. Having systematically asset stripped the global economy to line their own pockets, this very same fraternity has maintained an aloof detachment from the cruelty their psychopathic and narcissistic actions have had on their victims. Masterfully in denial of all culpability, they have stood by while millions of homeowners (forecasters predict twenty five million foreclosures in the US alone) had both their livelihoods and their equity removed from their grasp with a single expertly placed blow.

Shackled indefinitely to mortgage shortfalls as a direct result of bank profiteering, and bullied and beaten by the banks henchmen, the individual is also expected to pay the price of the global economic crisis. In contrast the bankers are still enjoying remunerations of up to 500 hundred times that of the national average earnings. For many of those trapped in debt sentences for life, emancipation is unimaginable and with debt forgiveness out of the question, it is little wonder there has been a 36% increase in the suicide rate. Even more staggering, this figure by far exceeds the 21% increase in suicides during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Throughout the years of financial crisis help for those paying the consequences has definitely not been at hand. The UK government and their regulators have paid little more than lip service to the much needed rescue packages promised to those experiencing mortgage distress while news of a further drop in share price for many of the “too big to fail” UK banks following the announcement of two billion dollars in losses at “too complicated to control”JP Morgan only serves to highlight how little has changed since the onset of the global recession.

While the Greeks and the Spanish struggle to reach any solution at all, newly elected French prime minister, Francoise Hollande may well have had the task firmly in his sights when he stated, “My principal adversary has no name, it has no face, and it does not belong to a political party, it has never presented its candidature and has never been elected but it still governs. This adversary is the world of finance” but, encouraging as his words are, he too has yet to deliver.

However, in the US, it appears the tide may at last be turning.

Distressed homeowners with underwater mortgages and more than two months of arrears are to receive aid in the form of principal reduction in an effort to enable them to stay in their homes. After year long government negotiations the banks in question hope to avoid 850 million dollars of penalties by financing a rescue package for the individual which not only avoids the huge costs and the heartache of foreclosure, but helps those in difficulties get back on their feet. Although some would say the twenty five billion dollars set aside to implement this is still not enough and the banks have, once again, got off lightly, it is a far cry from the heartless foreclosure policies of the UK’s banking industry.

Delighted to hear our American cousins are soon to benefit from the support of a government prepared to take some of their errant bankers to task, I cannot help but wonder why a similar settlement has proved impossible to arrange for sufferers of negative equity mortgages here in the UK. Had this been the case when I was in the grips of repossession at the hands of HBOS, my story would have been very different to that which I tell now.

Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States once said, “When people fear the government there is tyranny: when the government fear the people there is liberty” and hearing these words I am left wondering what future can we in the UK can expect when it blatantly obvious that our government lives in fear of the banks.                                                                                                               

Blame and Circumstance

Jean Paul Getty once said, “If you owe the bank one hundred dollars that’s your problem, if you owe them a hundred million dollars then that is their problem” and while a global economic recession gives rise to worldwide fretting over trillions, democracy remains the process by which the "powers that be" choose to allocate the blame.

For  Antonio Horta Osario, chief executive officer of  41% tax payer owned banking giant Lloyds, it is over enthusiastic claims management companies swamping his administrators for PPI compensation who are getting his goat. Lloyds are expected to pay out an estimated five hundred million pounds to clients to whom they have miss-sold PPI. Mr Horta Osario says one in four claims submitted by these companies are for individuals who are not eligible for compensation nor have they been customers of the bank and says this blanket approach to the claims process is not only slowing it down but costing Lloyds money. His has publically stated “ it is fraud and it must stop”. However he has not felt the need to make such strong statements about Lloyds Banking Group’s own HBOS executives, despite the knowledge several are now facing criminal charges for alleged financial crimes which have cost the indivual and the economy billions.

Defence secretary, Philip Hammond, has also chosen to point his accusing finger this week declaring he is of the opinion it is the individual who “over borrowed in the economic boom who must now admit to their part in the financial crisis”. He says the banks had to lend to someone and these people should “accept responsibility for the consequences of their own choices” rather than conveniently cast the blame on the banks.  However, when speaking of the period in which he helped formulate David Cameron’s economic strategy in opposition he says, “We started living a lifestyle both in private consumption and in public consumption which could we not afford [and it] ran away with us” so unsurprisingly it appears the governments take on the financial is what is sauce for the goose is not necessarily sauce for the gander.

In contrast, Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, previously reluctant to lay the blame at anyone’s door, now tells us it is “the failure of a system” that is at fault and not the individual. Speaking of “a slow and steady recovery coming during the course of 2012” he admits the Bank of England must take a “share of the responsibility” for the financial crisis and “with benefit of hind sight should have shouted from the rooftops that a financial system had been built in which banks were too important to fail, that banks had grown too quickly and borrowed too much, and that so-called “ light-touch regulation hadn’t prevented any of this”.

It also seems HBOS auditors KPMG may well be shouldering some blame this week following reports an official investigation by the Financial Reporting Committee to investigate their conduct following HBOS whistle blower Paul Moore’s letter to the Treasury Select Committee sighting an inaccuracy in their forensic audit regarding his dismissal as global head of regulatory risk in 2005. Mr Moore was “let go” because he disagreed with the board’s attitude to risk and warned that HBOS’s lending strategy had become dangerously over heated. He believes KPMG’s decision to record this event as “a clash of personalities” was wholly misleading to the Lloyds takeover of 2008 and eventually cost the tax payer a further millions in government bailout support . Mr Moore blames the fact that, “money seems to be more important to KMPG’s strategy than integrity and professionalism”.

And

Stephen Hester, chief executive officer of 84% taxpayer own Royal Bank of Scotland is also casting the blame this week and its not, as one might expect on his predecessor Fred Goodwin who has already been stripped of his knighthood, is facing criminal charges for fraud and may well have past bonuses recalled to help fund PPI compensation. Instead Mr Hester’s eight gardeners on his 7 million pound, 350 acre Oxfordshire estate tell us rain has blighted attendance of the annual charitable opening of his twenty five acre gardens. It may not have crossed Mr Hester’s mind his infamous fight to keep his £963,000 bonus earlier this year despite a dip of 36% on its share price, a first quarter loss of 1.4 billion and further RBS job losses ,bringing the total to almost 50% of its pre- crisis work force, might well have had something to do with the public's disinterest in his garden.

Founder of the Firestone Tyre and Rubber Company, Harvey S Firestone once said, “A man with a surplus can control circumstance, but a man without a surplus is controlled by circumstance and often has no opportunity to exercise judgement”. However if this week is anything to go by, this rule seems seldom to apply and it is for this reason I live in hope that, despite a life now lived without surplus, I will have the opportunity to exercise my own judgement in my ongoing personal battle with HBOS and will, one day, enjoy a result as a consequence of public opinion insisting the banks ultimately accept the blame.

Unequal Shares

Thomas Jefferson, third president of the US, once said, “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If [we] ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations that grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless.... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs,”  and if the 8,500 mortgage litigation cases against them are anything to go by, HBOS and Barclays are about to prove Jefferson’s words of warning  are correct.

A recent report warns banking giants Barclays and HBOS may well have to reimburse their customers for charges amounting to hundreds of millions. This is because HBOS’s and Barclays' shared appreciation mortgages, which offer an interest free capital sum in exchange for seventy-five percentage of the borrower’s equity, have harvested vast rewards for the bank at wholly excessive expense to the mortgagees. Some homes have appreciated by £300,000 in the 10 years since the loans were made meaning homeowners have had to pay more than £200,000 on loans as little as £25,000. These products were designed and targeted at low income customers who were quite often elderly and have proved doubly lucrative for the lenders because properties values were in the doldrums when many of these products were sold. This gave the banks the perfect window of opportunity to acquire a  substantial slice of an often vulnerable individual’s future equity for a minimal outlay throughout the depressed years of property growth during the 1990’s.

Hilary Messer of RWP solicitors is waiting for more people to come forward before she brings this proposed class action formally to the attention of HBOS, Barclays and the courts but it cannot have made it any easier for those Barclays shareholders aware of this pending lawsuit to know there could be a demand for a further 850 million pounds on top of the ongoing costs of the PPI claims and the impact of the government bailouts. Neither can it help to be made aware that less than half of Barclay’s chief executive Bob Diamond’s pay packet is to be growth related. Little wonder so many shareholders were vocal in their discontent to discover Bob Diamond is to enjoy a 2.7 million bonus on top of his 1.35 million salary in addition to the 5.7 million he has already received to cover his tax bill. However, it must have been nothing short of incendiary to find Barclays staff bonuses of 2.25 billion pounds in 2011 were triple the 730 million pounds paid out in dividends to share holders.

While David Cameron says the lack of economic recovery is, “very, very, disappointing” and Ed Milliband blames the present governments “catastrophic”  polices and lack of meaningful banking reform, it is clear from the actions of Barclays and HBOS they remain blissfully detached from the effect the first double dip recession we’ve had since the 1970’s and the impact it is having on the rest of us. Instead their executives continue to feather their own nests and, in the case of the Bank of Scotland, attempt to paper over the cracks with an advert created  by London-based advertising agency RKCR/Y&R and developed “to reassert traditional values”. It tells us, “You never know what is going to be round the corner, or what twists and turns life is going to take.” I beg to differ. I have always found past performance to be a reasonable indicator of what’s on the cards for the future and in the case of HBOS and Barclays it is clearly going to be more of the same. It is because of this my personal battle with LLoyds and HBOS is destined to be a long one as is, I suspect, any hope of economic recovery.

Thomas Jefferson also said, “It is error alone which needs the support of the government while truth can stand by itself” and sadly for us, it seems he’s right again.

Girl Power

In the words of Groucho Marx, “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made” and with this in mind I am left wondering whether David Cameron is discovering or faking the secret of life when he speaks of the benefits of corporate equality and the need for more women in the boardroom as his ready remedy for the current economic crisis.

While I whole heartedly agree honesty and fair dealing, regardless of gender, should be a motivation for us all, I struggle to understand how Cameron plans to instigate a shift in age old corporate habits to ensure women get more top industry jobs when he remains unable to implement a shift in either policy or legislation which meaningfully takes to task the perpetrators of banking fraud or makes them accountable for their crimes against the economy.

Little more than one hundred years ago women fought for sound policy and impartial justice for all.  A century later however, it is not just women who are suffering the consequences of discrimination, this time by government backed banking recklessness and unbridled favoritism, when it comes to arrears solutions and debt forgiveness for individuals.

Although I applaud the principal of a meritocracy which takes no heed of gender, the chance of success will remain limited if our government appointed regulators continue to support employers like HBOS who openly declare they have no obligation to discuss lending matters with married women if they have already discussed them with their husbands.  I cannot imagine this Lloyds TSB Group owned, taxpayer supported corporation will be one to embrace a louder female executive voice on the board or anywhere else if my own experience is anything to go by.

For me it is Kishore Mahbubani not David Cameron who explains who will be guiding our politics towards economic recovery when he says,

"The simplest way of understanding the virtues of meritocracy is to ask the question: why is Brazil a soccer superpower and an economic middle power? The answer is that when it looks for soccer talent, it searches for it in all sectors of the population, from upper classes to the slums. A boy from the slums is not discriminated against if he has soccer talent. But in the economic field, Brazil looks for talent in a far smaller base of the population, primarily the upper and middle classes."

I strongly suspect any vision for economic recovery is destined to suffer the mediocre results of the Brazilian economic field if it continues to remains so deeply entrenched in the old boy network it is unable to pay anything but lip service to accessing the untapped potential of womankind from either the upper middle class or anywhere else for that matter.  However, in the event this is not the case and more women do find their way into high places with David Cameron’s help, I can only hope their effectiveness might bode well for those of us who have been discriminated against and defrauded out of our financial futures at the hands of banks like HBOS. If not, judging by the number of comments attached to articles on this subject, Cameron’s words have made a high profile and debatable headline even if, like Groucho Marx’s suggests, the speaker has merely mastered the art of faking it.

Dark Knights and Hoods

Evangelist Billy Graham said, “There is nothing wrong with men possessing riches. The wrong comes when riches possess men” and hearing that former HBOS executive Peter Cumming’s corporate lending portfolio was something of an Aladdin’s cave, I can see how tantalising the promise of such riches must have been; especially to those who were ignorant of the fraudulent methods employed to achieve them. For those who agreed to practise the dark art of perpetuating “the get rich quick” myth on the balance sheets, I have no doubt the power that accompanied such lucrative returns was both all consuming and intoxicating.

Still victimised by the consequences of the ongoing banking gluttony, I often speculate as to how HBOS originally portrayed my own residential mortgage in April 2006 when an £790,000 advance was secured against my home based on what I now believe was a grossly inflated valuation of £925,000. It  has been no surprise to find HBOS' continued nonchalant attitude has persisted and precluded me from all discussions regarding this mortgage from the outset until the moment I contacted them about our financial circumstances in October 2008. Now I am even more curious to know how my unrecoverable £217,000 shortfall is being recorded in their loan book and explained considering it represents a nose dive of approximately 30% against their in house valuation only three years earlier and remains completely unrecoverable.

However, with all eyes currently on who will or won’t take a slice of the millions set aside for bankers bonuses this year and increasing public interest in who should be next to follow Fred Goodwin into his Knighthood free status, I cannot imagine anyone within HBOS or the FOS are wondering if the vast amount of HBOS debt that continues to be written off every day by Lloyds TSB might ever include a residential shortfall which has left me standing on a financial precipice for years. Nor do I delude myself any consideration by the FSA has been given as to whether or not my unrecoverable loan is still propping up HBOS balance sheets as a fictitious asset on which to pay executive bonuses or instead it is being used to perpetuate another boardroom driven myth that lurks in shady recesses supported by negative accountability for financial crimes against everyone but the HBOS executives themselves.

Forever presented with antidotes to our economic health which continue to favour the corporate along with solutions limited to toothless acts of regulation designed to placate rather than resolve, I cannot comprehend why, to date, no government initiative or banking reform has focused on a reprieve for the individual victims who, like me, remain in purgatory as a direct result of the well documented fraudulence, unadulterated greed and widespread corporate dishonesty of sociopathic CEOs, Banksters and their Hoods.

In the words of Abraham Lincoln, “We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution” however, despite an economic crisis of global proportions, those who cruelly perverted the course of both my financial and family life, along with the lives of thousands of others like me, are not only at liberty to bully and persecute their victims without restraint but, thanks to David Cameron’s Christian principals of forgiveness and the captured policies of his regulators, they remain free to pervert any chance of a morally sound outcome for the individual.

Rot and Regulators

Marcus Aurelius once said, “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth” and having opened an email from the Ombudsman’s adjudicator, I am endeavouring to focus on the wisdom of this Ancient Roman Emperor’s as I contemplate my appointed FOS representative’s thinly veiled words of contempt for my fourteen page letter asking for her help.

While the FSA are happy to spend tax payers money by the million on “shaped” investigative reports that avoid holding RBS executives to account and David Cameron continues to trade on his selective Christian principals to explain how “quick [he] has been to forgive the bankers” along with his “biblical” reasons for not seeking retribution, it seems evident the circling of waggons to protect the select few is high on the Financial Ombudsman’s Service’s agenda too. I have grown used to the obstructive attitude of the complaints business as a result of my pursuit of a full, formal and detailed investigation into the unnecessary forced sale of my home by HBOS.

Since I initially contacted the FOS for their help in April 2011 I have been told,

·       They “cannot interfere with the commercial judgement of a business” despite the fact that it clearly states on their web-based consumer fact sheet that, “In some ways we are like a court of law- and our Ombudsmen are like judges.”

·       It is not their job to look back at a situation “with the benefit of hindsight” and change the outcome in spite of their consumer fact sheet stating, where an individual has lost out because of a business’s actions, “we can tell the business what to do to put things right”.

·       They cannot see how “exactly [I] expected [HBOS] to contact me directly” with regard to the mortgage arrears that led to repossession of my home even though I have on good authority HBOS have a legally binding “duty of care” to me in this respect.

·       They cannot see “how it would have been possible for [me] to have dealt with these arrears on my own even if [HBOS] had managed to contact [me] directly” or make use of this information to avoid the repossession of my family home, despite in clearly stating in the HBOS Mortgage Conditions Booklet that letting an HBOS mortgaged property is an option albeit “with the lenders permission”. In fact the FSO’s own technical note explains, in detail, how they investigate a complaint about premature or unnecessary repossession.

·       They “cannot see there is anything to be gained by addressing each of the points within my complaint individually” even though it clearly states in their fact sheet they “don’t take sides and always take a fresh look at the situation.”

Yesterdays FSO correspondence now states,

·        “As [HBOS] initially stated that the complaint was outside of the Financial Ombudsman's jurisdiction, it is likely that this element will need to be dealt with first [and] as such it is likely to be sometime until this is finalised” and my case passed on to an Ombudsman for investigation.

Astounded by the throwing of an HBOS favouring spanner into the works and further outraged because I believed I had addressed the issue of juristiction and laid it to rest at outset, I cannot pretend to be surprised I have unearthed yet more evidence of regulatory tolerance for banker’s criminality. Furthermore I was  completely unprepared to find the Financial Ombudsman Service would, like HBOS’s own complaints department, be unashamed of their tainted allegiances and unrepentant for their acts of discrimination against me to the extent they would put it in writing.

Having compiled my reply I remain in wait, once again, in the hope my HBOS compliant will  receive the airing I believe it deserves while I marvelling at those who believe we are best served by watered down banking reform and regulation. With David Cameron descibing himself as an intermittent but practising Christian who allows himself to “ignore the biblical passages concerning the sick and the poor”  there is little wonder the way is left clear for our regulators to feel empowered to protect the favoured few.  Bureaucratic endorsement of regulatory apathy and injustice for the majority not only ignores basic human values in favour of supporting the prosperity of the self appointed elite but the self-interest of government driven directives to forgive the criminal actions of the casino bankers avoids their prosecution and leaves their swag bags bloated an untouched.

Thomas Jefferson once said,“ Is it less dishonest to do what is wrong because it is not expressly prohibited by written law?” I for one cannot imagine this is a conundrum the greedy bankers, David Cameron or his puppet regulators spend any time whatsoever deliberating over. For the favoured few the law, government guidelines and codes of conduct created for the benefit of the greater good are completely irrelevant.

Consequences

When speaking of his concerns for the future in 1900, William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army said, “I consider that the chief dangers which confront the coming century will be;

·        Religion without the Holy Ghost,

·        Christianity without Christ,

·        Forgiveness without repentance,

·        Salvation without regeneration,

·        Politics without God,

·        Heaven without hell”

I cannot comment on the whereabouts of Christ or the Holy Ghost but on all other counts it appears the bankers are set to benefit from the absence of the very same moral guidelines Booth feared would be lacking in his modern world more than a century ago. 

While David Cameron prepares us for watered down banking reforms instead of the fire and brimstone promises surrounding his election, not only are the individuals responsible for wrecking our economy sitting pretty, but they are also set to continue to enjoy fruits without labour.  Carefully crafted economic scaremongery has some speaking of the proposed retail bank ring fencing being deferred as late as 2019 so they will also be unlikely to be required to repent or regenerate.  Because of this I can not see how they will ever be made to suffer the consequences of their greed driven actions.

I, on the other hand, am expected to pick up the pieces of my life with a hellish £217,000 shortfall hanging over me, take the consequences of HBOS’s decision to create this unrecoverable debt squarely on the chin and accept the words of Antonio Horta Osorio’s very junior lackey from Mortgage Recoveries when he says, in response to my “All I need is you” letter,

“I would like to place on record that I feel that Halifax is fully entitled to pursue you for your liability and has not done anything wrong in this matter.”

With deny, deny, deny remaining firmly on the tip of every HBOS tongue and omnipotence as its guide, I cannot imagine anyone within Lloyds or HBOS thinking twice when laying the consequences of the financial crisis firmly at the feet of the individual while expecting us and the taxpayer to suffer the fall out for their actions for years to come.

This is hardly surprising when those at the top, having appointed a scapegoat or two, have succeeded in keeping their jobs along with their enormous remuneration packages and in so doing cunningly “ring fenced” themselves and their families , together with their personal financial futures, against an economic crisis they created.  Powerless in the face of their own funding shortfalls, governments and regulatory authorities alike continue to keep the feral elite sweet by paying lip service to the radical changes and reforms required to bring this omnipotent banking culture to task.  Because of this, and no doubt after much posturing on all sides, I can see that, yet again, we will find ourselves advised it is safest to dance to the untouchables tune while the economy burns even if  the impoverished individual has no alternative but to pay the price.

William Booth said, “To get a man soundly saved it is not enough to put on him a new pair of breeches, to give him regular work, or even give him a University education. These things are all outside a man, and if the inside remains unchanged your have wasted your labour. You must in some way or other graft  upon the man’s nature, a new nature which has in it the element of the Divine.” I and my family have put on the new breeches, found regular, albeit menial, work and grafted on a new nature with which to face our changed world. It is clear the banks have no intention of doing the same.