In 1995 Bank of Scotland celebrated 300 years as Britain’s oldest commercial bank. Voted ‘most admired bank’, respected by competitors, applauded by investors and trusted by customers, it looked forward to the next three hundred. Less than 15 years later it was bust, reviled as part of the spectacular collapse of HBOS, the conglomerate it had joined. One of the high-profile victims of the credit crunch, its spectacular fall caused seismic shock waves throughout the financial world. What went wrong? Ray Perman, who has followed the Bank since the 1970s when he was a Financial Times journalist, uncovered the story from documents and dozens of interviews with people at the top in Bank of Scotland and HBOS – from being the bank of choice for the high-rolling Monte Carlo mega-rich to losing £10 billion. It is a cautionary tale for our times. In the complex world of modern global finance, the brilliant men who ran the company ignored the simple banking rules that their predecessors learned the hard way three centuries before.
About the Author
Ray Perman was a journalist in London and Edinburgh for thirty years. He was a co-founder of the business magazine Insider Publications and was Chief Executive of Scottish Financial Enterprise from 1999 to 2003. In 2011 he was appointed Chairman of The James Hutton Institute, the first institute of its type in Europe dedicated to making new contributions to the understanding of key global issues such as food, energy and environmental security. Ray Perman is the author of The Man Who Gave Away His Island: A Life of John Lorne Campbell of Canna (2010).
Follow Ray on Twitter @HubrisTheBook
Alistair Darling is a Scottish Labour Party politician who has been a Member of Parliament (MP) since 1987. He served as the Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2007 to 2010. Darling was one of only three people to have served in the Cabinet continuously from Labour’s victory in 1997 until its defeat in 2010 (the others being Gordon Brown and Jack Straw).
