Poor excuse

Published on 16/09/2012 20:09

HBOS director Peter Cummings’s excuse for the disastrous governance of his department i.e. he was pressurised from above to buy volume rather than quality, is pathetic to say the least.

The culture of massive bonuses often amounting to three or four times basic salary – yet another of the bad business practices imported from the US – soon led to a culture of greed in financial services, which best served those in a position to manipulate results by increasing volume and taking profit on deals before the contract reached completion.

George Keravan (Perspective, 14 September) mentioned “if shareholders and bondholders don’t keep an eye on the business, it’s their fault”. But we have seen in various spats between company and shareholders and how powerless the latter really are. Furthermore, are they seriously equiped with sufficient information to identify creative accounting before the bubble bursts?

Where were the non-executive directors in this feeding frenzy? They should have had access to all relevent information and were supposed to be monitoring on behalf of all stakeholders – they failed miserably.

Mike Underwood

Friars Brae

Linlithgow