The UK financial regulator is to be grilled at its annual meeting on the continued delay to its long-awaited report on the collapse of HBOS.
Philip Meadowcroft, a former private shareholder in the failed lender, will demand that the Financial Conduct Authority commit to a date to publish the HBOS report, which was first commissioned in 2012 but which has been subject to legal wrangling and a series of hold ups.
It may not now be published until late this year, according to people familiar with the situation. That would be nearly a year after the last official deadline of December 2014 lapsed.
In its annual report earlier this month, the FCA said it was “committed to publishing the report as soon as possible but the legal process of Maxwellisation and consent can be lengthy.” Maxwellisation is the process by which those criticised in inquiries are allowed to make representations before publication. It is named after the former newspaper owner, Robert Maxwell, who was criticised in a government report in 1969 and subsequently took the Department of Trade and Industry to court.
But Mr Meadowcroft — who was a shareholder in both HBOS and Lloyds Banking Group, which took over HBOS in 2008 — intends to ask the regulator: “What possible credence, in asking for the fourth time, can we put on the FCA’s reply this year?”
The first round of Maxwellisation was finished before the end of last year, and a revised report shown to parties earlier this year, according to people familiar with the situation. But consent is also causing delays, the people added. Each subject and source quoted in the report must give their consent to what is published.
Of the report’s two parts, the second is expected to be more explosive. It deals with the financial regulator’s response to the collapse of HBOS and why no enforcement action was taken except against Peter Cummings, the bank’s former head of corporate who was banned and fined £500,000.
Senior regulators at the old Financial Services Authority, which was split into the FCA and Prudential Regulation Authority in 2013, are expected to be criticised in a chapter written by Andrew Green QC.
But while Mr Green’s chapter may be the more contentious, it is the chapters concerning the PRA that are causing delays, according to people familiar with the process.
An earlier report by the parliamentary commission on banking standards recommended regulators ban the three top executives at HBOS from working in the City. Lloyds meanwhile has been hit by a £400m shareholder lawsuit over the HBOS deal.
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