Media Spotlight: The Choice - Michael Buerk interviews Paul Moore, BBC Radio 4
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They say revenge is a dish best served cold and that certainly proved to be the case for Paul Moore, head of group regulatory risk at HBOS between 2003 and 2005.
Last September the HBOS whistleblower publicly claimed there had been a failure of key aspects of governance at the bank on the watch of his old boss Sir James Crosby. In the wake of this Crosby resigned from his post as deputy chairman of the Financial Services Authority.
But interestingly, in an interview with Michael Buerk on The Choice on Radio 4 last week, Moore claimed revenge was not his primary motive.
To be fair, from his account of how he was dispatched from HBOS he’d only be human for wanting some sort of retribution.
In 2003 the FSA completed a damning risk assessment of the HBOS group that was particularly critical about credit risk management at its corporate bank and questioned whether the sales culture had got out of control at Halifax. As a result Moore was promoted and charged with carrying out a root and branch review of the culture at Halifax.
He completed 50 top management interviews - right up to retail division chief executive Andy Hornby - and another 140 with frontline staff.
In a rather shouty style that Moore has clearly nicked from the presenters of MasterChef, he recounted to Buerk how bad things were.
He claims one employee admitted that staff could not hit their sales targets while selling ethically. There were also allegations of a scheme whereby if staff hit their targets on Saturday mornings they received cash and if they didn’t they were handed cabbages in public.
In Moore’s opinion “the regulator was right to be concerned” and he reported as much to the HBOS board on July 27. He also told the board the organisation should reconsider its strategy for sales growth if it wanted to avoid further risk to customers and colleagues.
Initial feedback was good. Moore claims that then HBOS chairman Lord Stevenson told him that at last the firm had found a head of regulatory risk who could do the job properly. And a group audit committee praised him for showing how serious matters were.
But after that things started to go wrong fast. Called into a meeting by Crosby, he was summarily fired. The then chief executive officer of HBOS told a surprised Moore he was reorganising the group and his position was being made redundant.
The bank then employed its own auditor KPMG - no conflict of interest there - to do another report which gave a damning assessment of Moore, describing him as prickly and a ranter who was full of self-importance.
He was paid off to the tune of £700,000 on the proviso he kept quiet. Which he did, until he saw the news about HBOS and Lloyds TSB linking up.
He says what worried him most was not losing the cash but getting into “a revenge thing” with Hornby and Crosby.
And the final push was divine, as the devout Catholic says he heard a call from above. A clearly vengeful God told him that “now is the time to witness properly”.
With the fallout such a problem for taxpayers and the Lloyds group, perhaps it’s a shame the Lord didn’t act sooner.
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