Lloyds cynically trying to restrict compensation to hbos reading victims

4 July 2018

Lloyds cynically trying to restrict compensation to HBoS Reading victims. 

loyds Banking Group is attempting to give a false impression of how it is treating HBOS Reading victims and cynically trying to restrict compensation to people denied justice for over a decade. SME Alliance, which has been pressing Lloyds to treat its small business customers fairly, is astonished that the bank chose to leak details of its reply to the Treasury Select Committee before the actual letter from Professor Griggs, who is running the compensation process for Lloyds, was published by the Committee’s chair, Nicky Morgan MP.

Said Nick Gould, chairman of SME Alliance: “The Griggs review is fundamentally flawed as it relies on inaccurate information provided by the actual fraudsters and is predicated on the lie that Lloyds did not know of criminality before the conviction of its own bankers in January 2017. Victims are given a ‘take it or leave it’ choice and are not told of the basis of how compensation is calculated, with the result that desperate, browbeaten business owners either accept derisory offers or face long waits for compensation that should have been paid a decade ago.

“Many people with legitimate claims have been refused entry into the Griggs process, as the remit has been drawn narrowly to only include those directly impacted by the criminals who were convicted. Yet the cancer at the core of HBOS was much wider, and included teams in London and a number of other centres.”

The recent publication of a “secret” internal Lloyds Banking Group report showed how victims of the HBOS Reading fraud have been misled and mistreated by the bank for years. SME Alliance, which supports many of those victims, has long maintained that not only did the management of HBOS and Lloyds publicly understate the extent of the fraud, but that they hoodwinked victims, shareholders and the public about what they knew and when.

SME Alliance will be writing to Lord Blackwell, chairman of Lloyds, to the Financial Conduct Authority, and to the Treasury Select Committee raising a number of issues both around the Griggs review and emerging from the Lord Turnbull report concerning the treatment of victims and correspondence with those victims going back to 2007.

SME Alliance was formed in September 2014 to support SMEs “battling against fraud, corruption and misconduct in the financial sector” and to lobby for the fair treatment of businesses by their banks and advisors.

For further information contact Jason Nisse on 07769 688618 jason@nisse.uk