Book description
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
highrolling Monte Carlo mega-rich to losing GBP10 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.
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).
