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You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/06/unthinkable-ban-disgraced-drivers

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Unthinkable? Ban disgraced drivers Unthinkable? Ban disgraced drivers
(6 months later)
Friday's report on HBOS from the parliamentary commission on banking standards is impressive for many reasons. But best of all is the way Andrew Tyrie's group has pinned culpability on the men at the top of the bank. Only one of them, Peter Cummings, has been banned from working in the City. Three others, successive chief executives Sir James Crosby and Andy Hornby and chairman Lord Dennis Stevenson, still hold some of the most important and well-remunerated positions in corporate Britain. Even after being forced out of a private equity company yesterday, Sir James is still an independent director at FTSE-100 firm Compass and chairman of a car-loan firm. At the bank they left behind, however, tens of thousands of employees have lost their jobs. This outrages any sense of justice and raises a natural suspicion that these un-disgraced bankers are able to use their connections to land plum jobs. Time surely for a far simpler rule: the chairman and chief executive of any failed bank should automatically be banned from working in financial services. This would not apply to executives drafted in just before a bank's crash, but it would extend to those who ran a bank for a long time, then stepped aside just before the crisis (such as Sir James). The regulator would need to publish a report within 18 months and ban any culpable bosses and directors asleep on the job. That is a simple enough rule, and it would concentrate minds in the boardroom.Friday's report on HBOS from the parliamentary commission on banking standards is impressive for many reasons. But best of all is the way Andrew Tyrie's group has pinned culpability on the men at the top of the bank. Only one of them, Peter Cummings, has been banned from working in the City. Three others, successive chief executives Sir James Crosby and Andy Hornby and chairman Lord Dennis Stevenson, still hold some of the most important and well-remunerated positions in corporate Britain. Even after being forced out of a private equity company yesterday, Sir James is still an independent director at FTSE-100 firm Compass and chairman of a car-loan firm. At the bank they left behind, however, tens of thousands of employees have lost their jobs. This outrages any sense of justice and raises a natural suspicion that these un-disgraced bankers are able to use their connections to land plum jobs. Time surely for a far simpler rule: the chairman and chief executive of any failed bank should automatically be banned from working in financial services. This would not apply to executives drafted in just before a bank's crash, but it would extend to those who ran a bank for a long time, then stepped aside just before the crisis (such as Sir James). The regulator would need to publish a report within 18 months and ban any culpable bosses and directors asleep on the job. That is a simple enough rule, and it would concentrate minds in the boardroom.
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