Wolves, Sheep and Regulators

Twice elected US president, Radical Republican and former union Army General, Hiram Ulysses Grant once said, "In every battle there comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten and then he who continues to attack, wins" and after three months of a bank battling impasse in which the Bank of Scotland's debt collection have been eerily silent, I have reach the conclusion an armoury of evidence is my only hope of defence should they chose to launch another attack. Without it, I am nothing more than a sitting duck.

Keen to leave no stone unturned, I embarked on another quest for information. I sent,

• Another request to the mortgage broker who submitted my falsified application to the Bank of Scotland in March 2006, this time via a DSAR, along with formal notification I suspect them of fraud
• A DSAR to the mortgage broker’s network support organisation requesting any information they might have relating to disciplinary action taken against the broker during the application process of my mortgage and a letter advising them I have put Karrek on notice
• An application  to my contents insurance company making a request for legal advice with regard to whether or not my falsified application renders my contract with the Bank of Scotland void, legal representation in the event Bank of Scotland wish to dispute my findings through the courts and some telephone time with a legal representative to explore the merits of a negligence claim against the broker
• A formal request to the FCA under the Freedom of Information Act requesting all information pertaining to any disciplinary actions or formal investigations relating to the mortgage broker, their network support firm and the Bank of Scotland. I have also specifically requested any information which would shed light on why (according the BoS' screen notes) the mortgage broker was removed from the  Bank of Scotland’s panel of brokers during the processing of my mortgage application in March 2006.

Believing my requests could provide me with pivotal evidence to support my claim that both I and the Bank of Scotland have been victims of mortgage broker fraud, I have also sent,

•  An outline of my findings to the Devon and Cornwall Police and requested my case be kept open while I await further evidence.

Ten weeks have now passed and I have received,

•  No response from the broker to my DSAR
•  No response or even an acknowledgement from either the broker or their network support regarding my letters putting them on notice
• No file of  information from the brokers network support team on grounds that the DSAR I made only covers personal information and the data they hold is not personal to me
• No reply from my legal insurers

Thankfully I have received,

• No objection from the Devon and Cornwall Police to leaving  my case open while I collect and collate further evidence.

However, I have also received,

• A totally meaningless five page reply from the FCA which concludes with, “we can find no record of a relationship between Karrek Financial Management and the HBOS lending panel and  with regard to all other points of your request “to confirm or deny that we hold any information specifically relating to enforcement or disciplinary action against either ...[the broker] or [their network support provider] Openwork Ltd would, or would be likely to, prejudice the commercial interests of a person or a firm (particularly the firms mentioned) and would, or would be likely to,  prejudice the exercise by the FCA of its functions under Financial services and Markets Act 2000 (“FSMA”). Therefore, we are unable to confirm or deny under section 43 (commercial interests) and section 31 (Law enforcement) of the Act whether or not we hold any information relating to action taken by us against these firms.” They further state, “the FCA also has a policy of not commenting publicly on whether or not it is investigating a particular individual or firm.

Former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Goldman Sachs and later 74^th  United States Secretary of the Treasury,  Henry Merritt “Hank” Paulson, Jr. once warned, “There is a very real danger that financial regulation will become a wolf in sheep's clothing” but if my own experiences are any measure, the complete reverse has proved to be much closer to the truth and, while some would still have us believe these very same regulators are the friends of the victims of banking crime, my six years long investigation into a Bank of  Scotland driven, broker implemented mortgage churning fraud would very much indicate otherwise.

With regulatory friends like these, who needs enemies?

Socially Useless Banking Regulation

Ardent socialist, co-founder of the London School of economics, novelist and playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, “Until the men of action clear out the talkers, we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none” and true to form, the talkers would have us believe austerity measures along with the reform of banking regulation have put both the heartache and the economic implications of the banking scandal firmly behind us.

Keen to keep us all abreast of the good news we are told;

•       “Britain is holding its nerve...the British economy is on the mend...[and]... we are going to make sure that everyone benefits from this recovery.” Chancellor George Osborne
•          “People need clarity over interest rates... to remove any uncertainty and to allow them to make economic decisions.” Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney
•        “Britain is seeing the green shoots of recovery...it is healing...and it is out of intensive care,"David Cameron’s spokesman to Reuters (on a daily basis) 
•      "Investors from around the world [are] investing in a British bank [and it] is a sign the British economy is turning a corner", George Osbourne after the sale of 6% of Lloyds bank to overseas investors.

However, for the  99% of us who occupy the real world, the picture remains significantly less rosy;

• The long overdue FSA/FCA investigative report into the collapse of HBOS is to be delayed until next year.
• “Economic recovery has been restricted to those at the top...it is not recovery for most people” Labour spokesman to Reuters 
• “A significant cohort of UK borrowers could experience financial difficulties if interest rates were to rise during a period of subdued income growth,” Financial Stability Report
•  Living standards in the UK are lower than they have been for a decade because inflation is still outstripping wage increases Reuters
•  Barclays and Lloyds have set aside a further 450 million to compensate people they have defrauded and Lloyds have used delaying tactics to encourage complainants to give up on their claims. 

In addition to these far from comforting social truths,  

• The recently published bi-annual Financial Stability Report states, the banks Financial Policy Committee relaxed the regulations for the UK’s big four lenders to allow them to "reduce their capital requirements by 20%"  and in so doing has provided them with a further 70 billion of cunningly disguised bailout.

Meanwhile, trapped between the legacy of widespread and hitherto unpunished banking avarice and the greed of my landlord, my family and I wait, without patience, for;

• HBOS to supply me with information I require to progress my case of complaint to the FOS
• The FOS to respond to my 1 August request that they ask HBOS to supply me with the information I have been awaiting for eight long months
• My landlord's builders to finish their noisy decimation of the Grade 2 listed property I have called home for the past five years

 And,

•  A letter from my landlord’s solicitor to advise me he wishes to increase my rent by a staggering 50% as a result of the installation of an extremely expensive, entirely unsolicited, sustainably fuelled heating system.

In October 2012, Any Haldene, Executive Director of Financial Stability and member of the Financial Policy Committee, made a speech to Occupy Economics to advocate socially useful banking. He said “concrete, practical proposals for change” would be delivered by way of banking reforms which addressed the five “c’s” (culture, capital, compensation, credit and competition) and further stated, “We know too that the costs of crises are felt disproportionately by the worst-off in society whose living standards tend to fall not just relatively but absolutely”. Yet, five arduous years on since my family and I lost our home, our livelihood and our financial futures, the talk continues while, for the 99%, the painful consequences of the crisis remain unchanged.

Stoic philosopher, inspirational master of equanimity and the last of the five good emperors of Rome, Marcus Aurelius, once said, “The guest at the lower end of the middle couch...who is digging in his big mouth with a toothpick is a fraud. He has no teeth” and while I wait, without mercy for the toothless Financial Ombudsman Service, to progress my miss selling complaint against HBOS, I can only conclude both the talkers, the bankers and the regulators are precisely the same.

Fates and Futility

Democratic US senator and noted civil rights activist Robert F. Kennedy once said, “ First is the danger of futility: the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills-against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world’s great movements... have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protest Reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World and a 32 year old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal so, with these commendable achievements already in the bag, how hard can it be to bring a few bankers to task?

Deemed “woefully unsound” by MP Andrew Tyrie and the parliamentary commission on banking standards, one might easily assume shirking ones fiduciary duty, turning a blind eye to money laundering, manipulating Libor rates, hard selling inappropriate toxic products and cooking the books to maximise their remunerations  might prove sufficient to bring about the sternest of criminal charges. However, for a gang of HBOS untouchables, the consequence of wreaking havoc with the UK economy and leaving widespread hardship in their wake have been nothing if not “alternative” in their nature.

Indentified by the FSA as far back as 2003 as an“accident waiting to happen” and led by just a few high ranking individuals who chose to use ineffectual financial regulation, a gullible government and the most malleable of auditors to promote “growth at any price", the HBOS three road rough shod over all who stood in their way for many a year. Blinded by greed and self importance they chose to ignore reports of fraud and warnings of dangerously high levels of risk and instead bullied, threatened and dismissed those who spoke out. As a result their “colossal failures” have cost 921 million in fallen share values, 20 billion in tax payer bailouts, 35,000 in in-house job losses and the repossession of countless homes and small businesses.

To date the personal cost to those responsible has been nothing more than a smattering of token fines, some nominal sessions of naming and shaming and a sprinkling of bad press.

HBOS chairman Lord Dennis “cuckoo land” Stevenson, who enjoyed more than £815,000 per anum for a role he viewed as part time, was indignant he should be required to step down from his chairmanly duties despite being found to be either “deluded or dishonest” for the part he played in concealing HBOS’s imminent collapse. However, he has continued to enjoy a variety of roles in well remunerated employment within the financial services industry by miraculously side stepping a ban from holding a directorship or working in the city and does not currently face any criminal proceedings.

Former HBOS chief executive James Crosby (2004-2006), who infamously bred a culture of dismissal for those who opposed his risk management views, chose to return his knighthood for services to banking and, after much pressure, volunteered a reduction of 30% to his £572,000 indexed annual pension. However, the millions he reaped in HBOS share options (two thirds of which he sold just before the bank’s collapse) along with his equally sizable bonuses have remain unencumbered. After his HBOS departure, he was not only offered, and accepted, the deputy chairmanship of the FSA but took up a number of lucrative positions on various boards because, despite widespread public outrage, he too faced no ban or criminal charges.

Boardroom brawling HBOS Chief executive Andy Hornby (2006-2009), who may well have found “the die was cast and it was too late for him to make any significant change" to avoid disaster, not only managed to avoid financial forfeiture for concealing (with the help of his KPMG auditors) 47 billion in HBOS losses before their LLoyds takeover but also managed to benefit from a “change of control payment” on his departure. Paid for by the tax payers bailout, he took £251,000 in cash and 2051 shares on top of his salary, his pension contributions, his awards in lieu of pension and his redundancy payments. Since then he has enjoyed the most senior of roles with both Boots and Coral, without a whisper of prosecution over his HBOS conduct.

Gordon Brown confessed, "I should have done more to prevent the banking crisis," and David Cameron assures us he "will make sure the banking crisis will not happen again”. However, while Downing Street continues to allow the bankster conscience to dictate their fates rather than their crimes, it is little wonder I who have battled with the untouchable Halifax Bank of Scotland for almost five years, have been unable to acquire an un-redacted version of each and every piece of information held on my HBOS file in order to progress my Financial Ombudsman Service case of complaint.

  

US novelist and former financial trader, Philipp Meyer once said, “"Give a small number of people the power to enrich themselves beyond everyone's wildest dreams, a philosophical rationale to explain all the damage they're causing, and they will not stop until they've run the world economy off a cliff" and while our government and their regulators prefer to endorse the calculation of capital as a solution to the banking crisis instead of prosecuting the banksters grossly inappropriate corporate conduct, all we can expect globally, nationally and individually is...

A whole lot more of the same. 

Learning Difficulties

First Viscount Saint Alban, philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist and author, Francis bacon once said," It's not what we eat but what we digest that makes us strong: not what we gain but what we save that makes us rich: not what we read but what we remember that makes us learned: and not what we profess but what we practice that gives us integrity" and although I have drawn strength from words such as these throughout each and every excruciating year spent in the ruthless jaws of the Halifax Bank of Scotland, I suspect for the vast majority of those I am forced to deal with, strength of resolve, fair practice and  integrity occupy a negligible space among their tasks in hand  and  this week’s correspondence has offered  little opportunity to think otherwise.

Following receipt of  the Financial Ombudsman Service’s confirmation  that my miss selling case has been accepted  and  is now awaiting allocation  to an adjudicator, I have  requested a copy of  every single document relating to my Bank of Scotland  mortgage from the following organisations.

• The solicitor who conveyed my mortgage
• The Bank of Scotland archive
• The surveyors  instructed to value my property
• The mortgage broker who introduced our application to HBOS

Excited in anticipation of the information my actions might afford me, I was delighted to find my solicitor happily agreed to put the matter in hand immediately and, in spite of a history of reluctance to assist in my compliant,  I am equally pleased to report HBOS have agreed  to furnish me with the information I require by 1 April.

Both the surveyors and the broker have not.

Much to my astonishment, not only have I discovered the surveyors instructed to value my home were salaried HBOS employees, but because of a specific instruction by the Bank of Scotland at the time of application  stating I should not be supplied with the valuation, these same HBOS employees remain unwilling to part with any information  now. Furthermore, the broker who placed our £790,000 mortgage with HBOS in 2006, and by so doing earned himself a healthy £4,000 fee, now regrets they are unable to supply copies of documents relating to my mortgage application because their regulators do not require them to keep records for this length of time.

As my recently acquired advocate and I smell a rat, I have written to the Financial Services Authority to ask for their comments on the mortgage brokers letter. I now wait with interest to learn the outcome.

American novelist and author Lloyd Alexander said, “We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and  not finding it than from  learning the answer itself” and  while some continue to  seek answers which negate bonus caps and others prefer profits to serve the greater good, I plan to practice the art of asking questions of HBOS because I am convinced  it is as organisation where fraud  has come naturally and because of this I am now paying the price.

Guilt and Weakness

German born theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein, once said, “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius, and a lot more courage, to move in the opposite direction” however when it comes to regulating our errant bankers or taking them to task for their crimes, it appears genius and courage are not to be called on. I am certain it is because of this that my dealings with the Financial Ombudsman Service continue to make little progress.

Following a full review of my file, a process which took a further three weeks, I am now told,

·        The FOS do not accept they are guilty of giving an unresponsive HBOS countless opportunities to discard my case on jurisdiction grounds whilst simultaneously hounding me for instant replies in order to be “fair to the business”.

·        The FOS do not accept they are guilty of unnecessarily asking me to collate my case in detail, despite declining it on grounds of jurisdiction after weeks of preparatory work, nineteen months later

·        The FOS do not accept they are guilty of favouring HBOS despite a period of nine months with no progress from the time I lodged my over-valuation complaint

However, in complete contrast to the tone of the majority of their letter I am also told,

·        The FOS sincerely apologise for their lack of diligence with regard to securing an HBOS response to my over valuation complaint. 

Mildly encouraged by this minor step forward yet resigned to the inevitability of endless waiting, I can only conclude the FOS's lack of impetus in this instance is not merely oversight due to unprecedented levels of complaints but is instead an endemic reluctance to tackle the UK's bankers and an clear indication of their discomfort at the prospect of unearthing another bankster miss-selling (or rather sub-prime overselling) scandal.  For this reason it is no surprise to hear,

•        Royal Bank of Scotland feel justified in their lobbying for legislative changes to enable them to repossess properties with distressed mortgages more quickly
•        The FSA are happy to risk more subrime selling by formally relaxing capital and liquidity rules for UK banks
•         While Martin Wheatley believes widespread miss-selling is a far cry from theft

With mounting evidence to suggest economic reform, financial regulation and banking prosecutions will amount to nothing more substantial than an after dinner speech, it seems the new chairman of the British Bankers Association, Sir Nigel Wicks, is correct in saying “we must all take personal responsibility for the restoration of trust in banking”. His words could not ring truer now that it is abundantly clear the restoration of trust in our bankers is to have nothing to do with the genius of our regulators and has even less to do with the courage of our Financial Ombudsman Service.

Albert Einstein also said, “Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character” and I suspect this is precisely what errant bankers are counting on to escape prosecution for their crimes. I hasten to add weakness of attitude and weakness of character is not what the Halifax Bank of Scotland or the Financial Ombudsman Service can expect to encounter in their dealings with me.

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.

Eating elephants

Anne Elliot in Jane Austen's Persuasion says women, more than men, feel the pain of tragedy for longer. I can only concur, as in my case, this appears to be only too  true. Where my husband has put the agony of our financial failure behind him, I am still, on occasion, haunted by the horrors of our demise along with the painful, frightening experiences which went with it. The memory of the vicious verbal attacks I received, together with the shame and discomfort I felt in our disgrace, can still make my stomach churn nearly three years later.

Never before have I ever had to explain to anyone, although substantial funds were owed to them, there was nothing in the pot with which to pay them. I saw this unpalatable disclosure as an act of "reneging" on our part and it was totally alien to me. I have always previously paid my way in full and I was tormented by the impact our downfall might have on other people’s lives. It was a phone call to an insolvency practitioner which helped me order my feelings about our circumstances. He did this by asking one simple question.

"Who took the commercial risk?"

This uncomplicated approached produced a healthy shift in attitude which enabled my almost instant recovery from a paralysis, self loathing and guilt which until this point enveloped me. Amidst the panic and chaos of discovering we were not only penniless but £1,000,000 in the red, I could finally see it certainly wasn't me who had taken a commercial risk and bizarrely enough it wasn't really my husband either. Applying this simple principal to each debt enabled me to start thinking rather than reacting. I immediately calculated, out of all the people we owed, who had and who had not taken a commercial risk. When it came to it, almost all our creditors had, while in full possession of all their faculties, entered a business arrangement with my husband which had not worked out. Unfortunate it may well have been, but nevertheless the decision to extend a line of credit to my husband was taken by business people who knew full well "you cannot win them all".

So if I, a fifty three year old house wife and mother of five, while suffering from shock and a debilitating grief has managed to grasp this basic principal, why are the business savvy high fliers at LLoyds TSB and the Bank of Scotland struggling to get a grip on the details of our situation and the futility of their pursuit?

I have recently discover the answer to this question in is BBC broadcaster and journalist Ian Fraser's report of February 2010. He explains why Halifax Bank of Scotland is the worst bank in the world and relays "it's calamitous seven year history". Not only were their executives "dangerously out of control and probably fraudulent" in their single minded high risk pursuit of short-term profits, but their initiatives held no regard for the long term cost to their share holders nor did they consider how their lending decisions would harm their customers. The executive directive appears to have been to achieve short-term profits regardless of the consequences. With this course set, Halifax Bank of Scotland's reckless and irresponsible behaviour was ultimately aided and abetted by the decision of the FSA to turn a blind eye to the banks blatant wrong doings. This created a toxic recipe was not only the undoing of many individuals but provides the back drop to my ongoing attempts to communicate my resulting financial distress to HBOS who, instead of showing understanding, have now become out tormentors.
More recently the Bank of Scotland and Lloyds TSB's have both adopted a pious public disposition to what they now choose to view as "other people's indulgences". It has made them impossible to reason with them over a £217,000 shortfall which they refuse to admit their own actions created. Unlike me and the our other creditors (totalling £600,000) all of whom have accepted we are without the means with which to repay them, these too big to fail banking institutions seem unable to comprehend they are merely dealing with a misjudged commercial risk from which they must move on. However I know this holier than though attitude is merely an elephant in the HBOS room which, if I am to enjoy any hope of a debt free future with my family, must be consumed. Thankfully I have it on the very best authority this task is a perfectly feasible one if I am prepared to approach it with one bite at a time.

With the help of some much valued prompting from friends and sympathetic bankers who have already written off our debts, I can see it is most definitely time to invite the media to the table. Here's hoping Ian Fraser, Jeremy Paxman, Jeremy Vine and anyone else who is prepared to listen have a penchant for a banquet of HBOS elephant.

Stand and deliver

I have been unable to think let alone write a post for the past four days and instead have ground to a halt from both exhaustion and brain overload. To the passerby, and even to most of my friends and family, I have functioned perfectly well over the last few days while cheerfully accepting more Friends  of the school challenges. I have successfully progressed my case with the FSA regarding the Bank of Scotland and even managed to be concise and business like in my correspondence. The proverbial rabbit is always pulled out of the hat, without fail, if I have I anything to do with it! This, after all, is my talent and it is one I am well known for.

However although I continue to step up to the mark, in reality, today it is not me who is present but merely an echo. Today the enthusiastic and energetic me has been banished by the pain in my head and I am left to look on at myself in helpless defeat as I am forced to succumb to the obliteration of migraine yet again. Gripped regularly with this stress induced master who often takes as much as three days to vacate, the pain, nausea and impaired vision often reaches levels which both consume my head and weigh down each of my limbs. Each time it happens I feel sure I will be unable to cope, but inevitably I always do. For me it is the tortuous price of each success and every failure.

Unable to share my affliction with those around me, I continue to smile while preparing Sunday lunch for twelve as planned or agree with the Head attending to an extra issue will be no trouble at all. To give in to this illness is completely beyond me while hiding it existence has become the purist of art forms. Unprepared to give this uninvited interloper an introduction to the people in my life it always remains my secret until long after its departure.

Finely honed over fifty three years my methods of concealment are exemplary and for the reason I am always available, without exception, to stand and deliver.

My debt shame

Today it was my intention to recount, from the beginning, the sorry tale of our suffering at the hands of HBOS. In the belief I had sufficiently distanced myself from our financial distress and regained the strength to put pen to paper I planned to inform the Financial Services Authority and the Financial Ombudsman Service precisely what the Bank of Scotland has done and the impact it has had on my family. I woke up determined to describe, in detail, how spotting us adrift with our three young children and fully aware we were fighting for our lives aboard a sinking ship, they ignored all government guidelines and instead chose to completely remove the wind from our sails, strip us of any chance of recovery and force us onto the rocks where their appointed debt collector now persecutes us for sport.

It was my intention to explain that a former career in the financial services industry did not prepare me for the pain a "too big to fail" giant was prepared to inflict. I wanted to make sure the Financial Ombudsman Service knew I had been rendered powerless against a banking machine which was deaf to my proposals and what is more, intent on wrecking the financial future of my whole family.  I believed it should be common knowledge the Bank of Scotland was unhindered by their own codes of conduct for customers in financial distress and intent on serving their own ends regardless of the cost to my family.

I was sure I could go back to the beginning and illustrate articulately and accurately how the Bank of Scotland chose to multiply our financial difficulties ten times over and, after stripping us bare, proceeded to persecute us for being unable to reimburse them. Sadly I was unable to do any of this.
Instead, all I could do today was cry.

.