Terry Murden's Business Blog: Legal challenge to Goodwin and co will be a hard nut to crack

Published on Tuesday 27 January 2009 11:26

THE near-collapse of the banks was bound to prompt calls for an inquiry but it is clear that some want to make an example of the bank bosses and force them to pay for their misdemeanours - quite literally.

Apart from demanding that Sir Fred Goodwin hands back his knighthood, there are some who believe he should also refund his bonuses. They forget that he was a casualty too who suffered a huge personal loss when the bank's shares slumped.

Goodwin is not the only target. Questions have been asked about how much Andy Hornby and Lord Stevenson at HBOS knew about the state of the bank's finances, particularly as the official line was that it was "well-capitalised".

Shareholders have every right to feel aggrieved at what has happened, but the fact that Goodwin was not alone will in itself make an action against him difficult to stand up. He can also point at the army of advisers, auditors and regulators who were happy to cheer him along, just as they backed the other banks in their merry-go-round of cash handouts. And that band of supporters included shareholders.

Of course, they will claim they were misled into believing the banks knew all along that the proverbial was about to hit the fan. Having spoken to some of the senior bankers in question I doubt it. They knew that trouble was coming, but none suspected that the banks would be close to complete collapse - just three hours according to some reports - and that the entire system would be in jeopardy.

Raising capital through a rights issue in order to pay off debt is, in any case, a normal procedure and there are no guarantees of success.

Investing in shares is, after all, a risky business. Looking at this from the point of view of the bankers, they could argue that the system of banking the world had come to know would survive on leverage because it had been seen to work.

However, the Achilles Heel in the bankers' case remains how much they knew about the build up of unsustainable debt levels and, for RBS, how much they trawled through the books at ABN Amro before putting pen to paper. That deal is fast looking like a deal for its own sake - to make RBS bigger for its own sake - and that somebody failed to notice that it was a poisoned chalice.

&#149 Terry Murden is Business and City Editor of Scotland on Sunday

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