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. 

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!! 

International Happiness Day

Self improvement guru, lecturer, and author of How to Win Friends and Influence People Dale Brekenridge Carnegi once said, “It isn’t what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it” and today, on International Happiness Day, I could not agree more.

Once devastated to the point of ill health I am relieved to say I am no longer the woman who could once be found underweight, completely bald from stress and cowering in her soon to be repossessed home. Police officers from the Armed Response Unit do not now frequent my drive to discourage angry tradesmen from laying siege and the threat of a claw hammer to my husband’s head is not what I think of when I hear a knock at my door. No more do I endure the involuntary stomach flips which used to go hand in hand with a glimpse of the postman approaching my house and neither do I answer each and every phone call with the trepidation of a woman braced for the onslaught of hard line debt collectors and their verbal abuse.

It has taken almost five years, upwards of three hundred and fifty letters, forty or more debt counselling consultations, three full blown Financial Ombudsman Service investigations, one hundred and fifty five blog posts, twenty thousand two hundred and ninety four page views,  one thousand nine hundred and ninety six tweets,  an inordinate amount of political and economic reading,  numerous phone calls, countless comments on facebook together with thousands and thousands of man hours to discover that although happiness is not dependent on what I have, where I am or what I am doing, happiness is definitely about having something to hope for.

American author and essayist Elizabeth Gilbert once said, “Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it” and although financially our circumstances have remained unchanged, I am very pleased to report that by fighting, striving and insisting I have not only discovered that I have been a victim of mortgage fraud but I have also found someone who investigates financial fraud on behalf of clients trapped by the wrongdoing of lenders and their associates who is prepared to take my case.

Because of this I now most definitely have hope and it is for this reason, today on International Happiness Day, I feel truly happy!

Ridiculous Enemies

Roman economist, lawyer and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero once said,” There is no sanctuary so holy that money cannot profane it, no fortress so strong that money cannot take it by storm” and while bonus pots continue to unashamedly reward the untouchables for their ever increasing list of banking failures, it is no surprise to find the words of this ancient Roman theorist still ring uncomfortably true.

Reputedly focused only on electoral gain, Cameron and Osborne do nothing to bring our elitist banking fraudsters to account while regulatory figure heads Turner and Wheatley prefer to promote the fallacy that the dirty deeds of banking avarice are but a distasteful memory of the unregulated past. In preference to making use of the laws of incorporation  to the secure the prosecution of those who chose to serve themselves at the expense of the majority, banking losses remain socialized while those who condoned them keep the wealth their dishonesty has afforded them.

In contrast, the  opportunities to seek recompense for those who fell foul of this culture of miss selling and manipulation are limited by way of cut backs to legal aid and the withdrawal of funding to charitable organisations such as the CAB. Yet, driven by the terror of an alternative which could herald the breakdown of the current financial system (not to mention the loss of influential friends and their much valued votes) our two faced politicians have left the victims of this criminal banking culture abandoned and defenseless in the jaws of their oppressors. As one would expect the ongoing governmental trend to pretend and placate the voters rather than address the root cause of the banking crisis, has done nothing to deter the same self serving and morally bereft people who now insist that lessons have been learned.

In the real world it is business as usual for the bankers and despite much talk about plans to serve both the economy and the customer, the long suffering individual is still being persecuted and bullied into untenable submission. The cases below represent the tip of a huge iceberg which is unlikely to feature on any politician or regulator's radar because, unlike powerful corporations with budgets for legal and financial advice, the individuals concerned have once again been hung out to dry having been left with no alternative but to succumb to the whims of the all powerful banks demands and then crawl away to seek some quiet solitude in order to lick their wounds. This is because many have neither the stomach , the knowledge or the means by which to stand up to the wanton disregard of the banking fraternity they are forced to deal with.

Over the past few months I have discovered;

HSBC, who laundered 600 million in drugs money and paid only the equivalent to a few weeks profit in fines as a consequence, are unprepared to renegotiate the terms of a 15% LTV mortgage of an employed professional woman, and a mother of three, who cannot make ends meet now her husband has been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. She has never missed a payment and had originally planned to repay her loan in five years time. She has been told by HSBC she has no alternative but to sell her beloved family home of twenty years as quickly as possible.

HFC, a key offender in the miss sold PPI scandal, have repeatedly told a chronically ill widow that her 30% LTV mortgage must be repaid in full. She has been advised her mortgage cannot be rescheduled  (her husband died without sufficient  life assurance to repay the loan) despite having made every payment in full every month for twenty years and a guarantee from her pension provider confirming she can afford to continue to pay. She is faced with the unpalatable prospect of selling her lovingly restored home as quickly as possible.

Barclays, who made a healthy profit from the manipulation of LIBOR rates, repeatedly told an 85 year old woman who believed she had purchased a lifetime mortgage  at 20% LTV that she would have to repay the outstanding balance on her mortgage with immediate effect or face the ordeal of the bank applying to the courts to take possession of her home. On attempting to initiate a formal complaint she was told it was unlikely to be dealt with until after her house had been forcibly sold.

And,

HBOS, who have earned themselves the reputation of being the worst bank in the world , unnecessarily forced the sale on my home rather than allow me to rent it to cover my mortgage payments, spent the past four and half years telling me a woman has no right to be informed separately from her husband about mortgage arrears if her husband is already in discussion with them and, having made use of a fictitious purchase price and purchase date in order to over value my home and sell me a mortgage in the first place, now tell me the discovery of these falsified facts has nothing to do with them. Furthermore, in true HBOS bully boy fashion, I have received two demands from their debt collections agency despite HBOS’s own acknowledgement that they understand my case is currently under investigation by the Financial Ombudsman Service.

French enlightenment writer, historian, philosopher and master of wit, Voltaire, once said, “I have only made but one prayer to God, a very short one: O Lord make my enemies ridiculous, and God granted it” and if recent events are anything to go by, ridiculous enemies appear not to be the exclusive domain of Voltaire!

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.

Unjust Desserts

American clergyman, activist and leader in the African civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King Junior once said, “A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.” However, waiting for history to take a favourable course in the wake of the unquenchable avarice of our unprosecuted banksters has frequently proved beyond the capacity of some to face alone. For us, the determined spirit of the Citizen’s Advice Bureau has been invaluable.

First formulated in 1924 as result a of the Betterton Report on Public Assistance and launched fifteen years later on the day after the break out of the Second World War, this government funded service quickly found debt advice was a key issue for those who sought the expertise of its trained volunteers. After seventy successful years offering free consultations to those in need, their initial two hundred offices had expanded to three and a half thousand UK locations and its 21,500 volunteer staff had assisted some of the UK’s most vulnerable negotiate homelessness, asylum, state benefits, employment law, tenancy rights as well as two major recessions and the onset of the banking crisis.

The CAB now prides itself on being able to assist more than 14.2 million individuals a year. They are supported over the phone and the internet as well as provided with face to face advice from the bureau or visits to their homes. In 2003 following a review of its practices by the Office for Public Management, it was concluded, “the CAB service provides excellent value in return for the public funding it receives. It makes a significant contribution to individuals and communities, as well as to the process of policy-making and service delivery. Its holistic approach, national coverage and independence are to be cherished.”

Ten years have passed since this commendable observation was made and the CAB is currently busier than ever assisting those who have fallen foul of an economic crisis caused by criminality within the banking sector. With only the top 10% of wage earners in the UK continuing to prosper, it goes without saying many of the victims of debt and banking fraud would struggle to find refuge from their assailants without the CAB’s help. Yet despite increasing demand, the CAB has recntly been forced to turn hundreds of thousands of people away because their funding has been axed by 45%.  As a result of these governmental and local authority cut backs they have no alternative but to close offices which are still playing a vital role in the community. Sadly the CAB office which rescued my own sanity is to be one of them.

In contrast to the invaluable contribution being made by the CAB, the delusional and unrepentant bankers armed themselves with weapons of financial mass destruction, used the window of opportunity created by financial deregulation to approach their business activities without moral hindrance plundered the reserves of their banks, their customers and the economy.  Furthermore, by obtaining tax payer funded bailouts to preserve their jobs and their “modest” remunerations, they have cunningly redirected funding formerly earmarked for the auspicious community serving CA B and deftly removed the only means by which many of their victims have been able to fight back.

Roman economist, lawyer and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero once said,” There is no sanctuary so holy that money cannot profane it, no fortress so strong that money cannot take it by storm” and recent history clearly illustrates that a small group of inauspicious bankers have used money to both profane and to storm and it is the Citizen's Advice Bureau and it's service users who are now being forced to pay the price. 

Truth and Punishment

Mahatma Gandhi, preeminent leader of Indian nationalism in British-ruled India once said, "Many people, especially ignorant people, punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you are right and you know it, speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth" and after receiving not one, but two heartless letters of HBOS hogwash this week it is clear that ignorance and a complete disregard for the truth is not just the prerogative of Gandhi’s British-ruled India.

It is now four and a half years since the sale fell though on our home and I was prompted to discuss with Halifax Bank of Scotland how best to avoid repossession. Deaf to my proposals to create a tenancy to cover mortgage payments, I embarked upon another fruitless year of communication with HBOS after they forced its sale. During this highly stressful period I enlisted the help of the Citizen’s Advice Bureau’s but, despite their best efforts, no amount of explanation could satisfy this infamous bank that we were in extreme financial difficulties or persuade them to arrest their pursuit of us. It is was only after I consulted a government funded debt management organisation in desperation that I discovered the mortgage on my home may well have been miss sold in the first place.

It has taken me a further three years, via the Financial Ombudsman Service, to persuade HBOS to investigate my complaint only to find their original offer of mortgage was based on both a fictitious purchase price and a fictitious date of purchase at the application stage. I was sure making HBOS aware of this discovery would illustrate, without question, that not only did my compliant have substance but both HBOS’s surveyor and the broker to whom they paid more than £4,000 for placing the mortgage with them, had over-valued my home at outset. Convinced I had finally secured HBOS’s attention, I was relieved to have taken my first, albeit small, step forward after so many unsuccessful years of trying to communicate. Here follows their reply and sadly nothing could have been further from the truth.

In HBOS’s first letter they state,

“The information that was provided in this [mortgage application form] was what was entered into our systems. We took this as being accurate in good faith, and based upon the valuation that took place during the application process, there was never any reason to think this was wrong...Having viewed your comments and our response, my previous letter...has provided you with our final conclusions...As you have reached the end of our internal complaints procedure, any further correspondence received will be placed on file as we do not feel that further communication with you will help resolve your complaint.”

In HBOS’s second letter (which arrived by the very same post) I am told “this matter” has now been put in the hands of their debt collectors.

Because of the scandalous actions of banks such as HBOS, the taxpayer has been saddled with,

•         An £850 billion bill to bail them out,
•     £1.1 trillion of potential liabilities
•     £560 billion of quantitative easing to rebuild balance sheets

Yet I who have lost my home, my livelihood and my financial future at their hands can not only expect to be pursued by them for a £217,000 shortfall for the foreseeable future, while they, in the face of evidence which clearly illustrates there has been serious wrong doing, choose to remain ignorant of the truth and punish me for having the audacity to speak out.

Harvey Fierstein, American actor, playwright, author and champion for gay civil rights once said, “Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim and accept no one’s definition of your life,” and because of the way in which HBOS have continued to treat me, it is my plan to turn this day along with each and every other one into an opportunity to follow, without deviation, every single word of Mr Fierstein’s advice.