SHAREHOLDERS CAN STILL SAVE OUR BANK

Listening to the podcast of the exchanges in the Scottish Parliament on Thursday (18/09) it was obvious that there was wide spread shock and dismay across all parties at the possible final elimination of Bank of Scotland as an independent bank.

This process began of course with the merger with Halifax to create HBOS but the Bank had survived that and despite dubious financial speculation by some it remained a powerful player.

Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have been at pains to deny any efforts to save Scottish jobs, not that this was ever in doubt. Personally I believe that Mr Brown welcomes the demise of Bank of Scotland, in fact he believes he deserves substantial credit for engineering the takeover! This shows a certain mindset where the Union Jack is all important and Scottish interests are subsumed to the 'greater good' of the British economy.

The rules have been changed to stop 'short selling' but it is too little to late and one wonders why it was not felt necessary to do so before this potential disaster for the Scottish economy had happened.

The Bank of England are also seemingly happy with the deal but any shareholder or employee of the Company must be deeply disappointed, not to mention HBOS's millions of depositors!

Mr Brown has inadvertently illustrated the urgent need for Scottish independence. An independent Government might not have saved this national bank but they would certainly have tried to do so, rather than cheering this disastrous deal.

Luckily the Bank can still save itself. If only 25% of their shareholders hold their nerve and reject this insulting offer then HBOS will survive as a separate entity.

If they do then the long term prognosis is good despite the panic and hypocrisy of the Bank of England and the British Government who appear to believe this well funded well capitalised bank was on the brink of collapse even though their own Financial Services Authority completely disagreed!