A long-awaited report into the behaviour of the banks at the centre of the HBOS Reading scandal has been pushed back – meaning victims remain without closure more than a decade on from one of Britain’s worst corporate frauds.
In January 2017, six people – two of them former HBOS staff – were convicted for criminal misconduct between 2003 and 2007.
A near-£250m loans scam run by corrupt staff and consultants dragged around 200 innocent business owners into severe financial distress.
Some of those victims are still waiting for the conclusions of an independent review into whether Lloyds – which took over HBOS in 2009, before the scam came to light – attempted to cover up the scam.
That review – led by the respected Dame Linda Dobbs and paid for by Lloyds and – began in 2017 and is still yet to see the light of day. As one campaigner put it in The Times last year, many of the victims – who lost businesses and life-changing sums of money – are now elderly, and many have died.
This month Dame Linda announced, in a message seen by a Times reporter and posted on twitter/X, that as “new questions and areas of enquiry have arisen” and therefore she now only expects to “complete the final witness interviews in the first half of this year.”
“The Review is a complex exercise,” Dame Linda wrote, and “my team and I are doing all we can to conclude the report as quickly as we can.”
Dobbs’ review is not a statutory inquiry and therefore she cannot compel witnesses to come forward.
The fraud has been compared to the treatment of sub-postmasters by the Post Office, brought to light again recently by the ITV documentary Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
Dame Linda also warned that as more evidence does come to light, it was possible her handover of the complete report to Lloyds could be delayed yet further.