HBOS Whistleblower Paul Moore Forecasts Second Banking Crash

Paul Moore was the former head of regulatory risk at HBOS, who in 2005 approached the company’s executives and warned them repeatedly that they were taking risks with financial stability and consumer protection. The board promptly reacted to his warnings by sacking him.

Paul Moore fears a second banking crash unless action is taken, according to BBC, 23 May 2011

Paul Moore was sacked when he told his bosses at the HBOS bank that lending billions to people who could not afford to pay the money back was a risk which would lead to disaster.

That was in 2004.

Within four years HBOS had to be pulled back from the brink of bankruptcy with a huge injection of taxpayers’ cash and a shotgun marriage with the much larger Lloyds Group.

During that time Paul Moore, who had been the executive in charge of risk management at the bank’s West Yorkshire headquarters in Halifax, had been unemployed and sitting at home in North Yorkshire.

His former employer had given him a six figure financial settlement on condition that he never spoke about the warnings he had given of impending financial meltdown before the crash.

But in 2009 he could keep his silence no longer. He was incensed when all the banks involved in what had turned out to be the biggest financial crisis since the 1920s told the UK’s financial regulators that there had been no warning of the crash which had been caused by dubious lending in the United States.

When MPs on the Treasury Select Committee announced they were to investigate the banks, he became a high profile “whistleblower”.

His evidence shocked the financial sector and even rattled the Prime Minister Gordon Brown who had been left to pick up the pieces of a shattered economy.

Paul Moore’s evidence forced the resignation of the HBOS chief executive who had sacked him at the bank.

He is concerned that despite promises of action both Labour and coalition governments have not curbed the excesses of the banks.

He is forecasting a second crash unless something is done now.

After the disappointing results of the ICB report, Positive Money will be working with Paul and a group of others with experience in the City to keep pushing for serious reform of the banking system, to prevent a repeat of the crisis and to stop the costs of the mistakes of banks being passed onto ordinary people. More on this later…