Blame Brown: Revenge of the whistleblower

Paul Moore, the former head of risk at HBOS, told the IoS that he has more than 30 potentially incendiary documents which he will send to MPs on the Treasury Select Committee. He says they disprove Mr Brown's claim about the reasons for HBOS's catastrophic losses – now estimated to be nearly £11bn – and show that it was the reckless lending culture, easy credit and failed regulation of the Brown years that led directly to the implosion of British banks.

After Mr Moore's explosive testimony at the MPs' banking hearing, the Prime Minister had denied the former executive's central charges and said that HBOS's difficulties were due to its flawed business model. Mr Moore says his documents refute this and prove the cause of the crisis can be laid at Gordon Brown's feet. He believes Mr Brown's failure to intervene over the reckless lending undertaken by all the banks over the past decade means he should go. "The failure goes right to the heart of the system – to the internal supervisory system and right to the top of government."
...
Mr Moore's evidence to the Treasure Select Committee last week led to the resignation from the Financial Services Authority (FSA), the City regulator, of the ex-HBOS chief executive Sir James Crosby, who dismissed Mr Moore from the bank after his warnings. In an exclusive interview with the IoS, Mr Moore revealed his documents contain all the evidence to support allegations he made to the HBOS board, which have been strongly denied by the bank and KPMG, the auditors brought in to investigate Mr Moore's claims. Yesterday, Mr Moore said his documents will "put to bed the idea that the KPMG report can be relied upon by Mr Brown, Sir James, the FSA and any other of the HBOS directors on the board at the time".

He says the papers – which he has kept from his time in his post as head of risk, from 2002 to 2005 – show that HBOS was involved in a huge sales drive to win market share which ultimately led to its collapse. Mr Moore claims that the "driven sales culture" was led by Sir James, and this, plus the "staggering failure" of the Government to manage the economy, had forced him to speak out. "Brown swaggers around holding himself out as the economic saviour of the world with a level of hubris that defies belief. But does he ever acknowledge that it was he, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, who presided functionally over the economic strategy that got us into this mess in the first place?"

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/blame-brown-revenge-of-the-whistleblower-1622467.html