HBOS Board Trampled Underfoot By Mighty Black Horse
Just two out of 11 senior roles in the new Lloyds/HBOS superbank will be filled by HBOS execs, while the board will be exclusively Lloyds, it’s been announced. If I had the time and the skills I would engineer a montage of the Lloyds horse trampling that lame cross-and-circles HBOS logo, but you get the picture. It’s basically Lloyds now.
So who’s got the cut? Only Jo Dawson and Harry Baines are staying, so a quick cast over the HBOS website shows that these guys are going to playing a whole lot more golf soon.
Andy Hornby – The only one to have officially stepped down (starting next year), Hornby found himself at the helm of a vast merged bank in the middle of a rather confusing sub-prime mortgage crisis when his grounding was in selling fruit and veg – he was originally the big man at Asda before going to Halifax and beginning his incremental rise to the top. He was courted by Boots during his reign, so expect him somewhere lofty and corporate very shortly. Incidentally, he came top of his Harvard Business MBA class of 800 people, the swot.
Peter Cummings – He’s the head of corporate banking, who are behind the yearly multimillion entrepreneurship drives funded by HBOS that seem very well meaning but have the whiff of tax break about them. He’s been working for the bank since 1973, so expect either angry tears or a role somewhere anonymous and sedate in the company. Or retirement – he made £2.6m last year alone.
Mike Ellis – Already retired once before in 2004, but got bored trimming roses and playing bingo, and came back in 2007 in his old position of Group Finance Director. Is he ready to be forcibly put out to pasture?
Also heading for the glue factory are Chief Operating Officer Philip Gore-Randall, head of retail Dan Watkins and treasurer Colin Matthew. The public would likely go mental if everyone got big golden goodbyes or whatever the appropriate “golden-” metaphor is, but the Mail reports today that they could receive £2.7m between them, while the Guardian suggests £7m. That would be galling, but it would be nothing compared with the Lehman gang, who got $100m between five of them just before the bank slipped beneath the waves.
P.S. Doesn’t Lloyds chief Eric Daniels look like Dr. No?
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