Post Office staff may soon get closure. What about HBOS Reading’s victims?
Post Office postmasters went unanswered for far too long. Let’s not repeat the error with HBOS Reading’s victims
Closure, it seems, is coming to the victims of the Post Office’s postmaster prosecutions, with politicians spurred into action by a heart-rending ITV drama. It is about time. But it is also true that it is not the only embarrassing episode in corporate Britain that has dragged on far longer than it should – and those whose lives and businesses were destroyed in the HBOS Reading affair deserve their own chance to turn the page, too. Somebody call Toby Jones.
To recap, in January 2017, six people – two of them former HBOS staff – were convicted for criminal misconduct between 2003 and 2007.
A near-£250m loans scam run by corrupt staff and consultants dragged around 200 perfectly innocent business owners into a world of pain. Some of those victims are still waiting for the conclusions of an independent review into whether Lloyds – which took over HBOS in 2009, before the scam came to light – attempted to cover up the scam.
That review – led by the respected Dame Linda Dobbs and paid for by Lloyds and – began in 2017 and is still yet to see the light of day. As one campaigner put it in The Times last year, many of the victims – who lost businesses and life-changing sums of money – are now elderly, and many have died. What closure for them?
But the furore over the Post Office should remind all concerned that those who are hurt by corporate misdeeds deserve to have their stories told, and their questions answered.
This paper firmly believes in British business, but that means calling out where it has failed the public. The Post Office, clearly, did so. Sunlight is the best form of disinfectant: it is time the victims of the HBOS scandal got their answers, too.