Britain's Lloyds to compensate fraud victims with $125m scheme

London: Lloyds Banking Group apologised on Friday to victims of a high-profile fraud for which six people were jailed this year and said it had set up a 100 million pound ($125 million) compensation scheme.
Britain's biggest mortgage lender has been under pressure to compensate the victims at its HBOS business, who say it reacted too slowly to their complaints, and will hope that this will draw a line under the controversy.
"We would like to express our deep regret and apologies to any customers directly affected by the criminal behaviour of these individuals," Chief Executive António Horta-Osório said.
The bank said in a statement it will provide interim payments on a case-by-case basis to assist victims in financial difficulty and appoint a senior independent lawyer to consider whether the bank properly investigated at the time.
Lloyds said the compensation was to cover economic losses, distress and inconvenience caused by the fraud.
Many of the businesses involved went into liquidation, resulting in job losses and financial hardship as a result of the scam. Two former bankers at HBOS, which was rescued in a state-engineered takeover by Lloyds in 2008, helped siphon off money from struggling businesses which were HBOS clients.
Britain's Financial Conduct Authority separately said it was resuming its investigation of the case, which had been placed on hold in 2013 pending the outcome of the police's own probe.
Former HBOS bankers Lynden Scourfield and Mark Dobson, businessmen Michael Bancroft, David Mills and his wife Alison Mills and accountant Tony Cartwright were convicted of various crimes after a five-month jury trial in February.
They were found guilty of a scam involving fraudulent loans and sent to prison for a total of 47-and-a-half years, among the toughest sentences handed out for a high-profile, white collar fraud in Britain in recent years.
The corrupt bankers asked struggling business owners to employ a turnaround consultancy as a condition for getting a loan and they were obliged to pay the consultancy high fees for services and, in some cases, hand over ownership.
Scourfield was bribed with designer watches, sex with prostitutes and exotic foreign holidays by his business associates for his role in the scam.
Judge Martin Beddoe said when sentencing him that Scourfield had "sold his soul ... for luxury trips with and without your wife, for bling and for swank."