Ex-HBOS banker 'sold his soul for swag'

A former HBOS banker and five other financiers have been jailed for their part in a £245m loans scandal.

Lynden Scourfield was sentenced to 11 years and three months, while consultant David Mills was jailed for 15 years.

Judge Martin Beddoe said Scourfield "sold his soul" to
 Mills in exchange for "sex", "bling" and "for swag".

Four other defendants were also convicted and sentenced
 to between 10 years and three and a half years.


The six were sentenced on Thursday over the scandal 
which targeted the bank's small business customers.

The group was found to have siphoned off funds and spent the profits on prostitutes, luxury holidays and a range of
 expensive items.

Michael Bancroft, 73, was jailed for 10 years; Mark Dobson, 
56, another former HBOS manager, was sentenced to four 
and a half years. The two were jailed on counts including bribery and money laundering.

Alison Mills, 51, and John Cartwright, 72, were given three 
and a half year sentences for money laundering.

Judge Beddoe said the case involved an "utterly corrupt 
senior bank manager letting rapaciously greedy people
 get their hands on vast amounts of bank money and
 their tentacles into ordinary and honest businesses".

HBOS, once Britain's biggest mortgage lender under the Halifax and Bank of Scotland brands, was forced to write
 off £245m related to the conspiracy.

In exchange for bribes, Scourfield, 54, a former HBOS manager, told customers to use a turnaround firm called Quayside Corporate Services.

Mills, 60, who ran Quayside with his wife Alison, bribed Scourfield with expensive watches, sex parties and, the
 court heard, "boys' jollies".

These were given in exchange for loans which allowed 
Mills and his associates to charge high consultancy fees.

Scourfield, who looked after corporate customers at 
HBOS' branch in Reading, pleaded guilty at an earlier trial 
last year to six counts including corruption.

The bankers were bribed to push businesses to use
 Quayside, which claimed to be expert in running
 companies.

Many of the businesses were perfectly sound and had no need of help, but were told their relationship with their
 bank would be in jeopardy if they did not agree to use Quayside.

"Their victims were people who were trying to contribute to
 the economy," said Detective Superintendent Nick John of Thames Valley Police.

"They were normal people running small to medium-sized
businesses who needed support and instead had their livelihoods, and in many cases, their lives, destroyed."


'Marriages broken'

Some of the victims lost their companies, livelihoods and 
even their homes due to the scam.

Paul and Nikki Turner, from Cambridge, tried to report 
what was going on after their publishing company, Zenith,
 was run into the ground by the scammers.

"They defrauded us, denied for 10 years that the fraud 
had happened, ignored the debt from the fraud and tried 
to evict us 22 times in order to cover up the fraud," Mrs 
Turner said outside court.

"It's a huge success for us that the trial has gone on."

She added: "The other victims have gone through terrible things, they have gone through the loss of businesses and
 lost homes."

"Other people lost everything, including marriages broken 
up, because of this."


Sex parties

The CPS special prosecutor, Stephen Rowland, said the 
case at Southwark Crown Court was one of the largest and most complex the special fraud division had ever prosecuted.

"It involved millions of documents, a lot of the material we 
had to look at was electronic and of course in this day and
 age  the capacity for electronic media is huge," he said.

Businessmen Bancroft and Mills arranged sex parties, 
exotic foreign holidays, cash in brown envelopes and 
other favours for  Scourfield between 2003 and 2007.

In exchange for the bribes, Scourfield would require the bank's
small business customers to use Quayside.

But far from helping turn businesses around, Mills and his
associates were milking them for huge fees and using their
relationship with the bank to bully the business owners and strip them of their assets.

In cash fees alone, according to prosecutors in the trial, £28m
went through the accounts of Mills, his wife and their associated
companies.

But the true value to Mills of the corrupt relationship with
Scourfield was much greater.

"What Scourfield gave Mills in addition to fees was the opportunity to take control of the various businesses and, 
in some cases, to acquire ownership of them," prosecutor Brian O'Neill QC told the court.

"Mills and his associates used the bank's customers and
 the banks's money dishonestly to enrich themselves," he said.

HBOS, now owned by Lloyds Banking Group, said: "The
 trial highlighted criminal actions that bear no reflection
 on  the behaviours of the vast majority of the employees 
of HBOS at the time or in the group today."

One other defendant, Jonathan Cohen, was acquitted at 
the trial, which finished this week after four months.