* Stevenson said bank was 'in as safe a harbour as possible'
* Stevenson says corporate division grew too quickly
* Says bank had moved to cut dependence on wholesale funding
LONDON, Dec 4 (Reuters) - The former chairman of HBOS told
Britain's financial regulator the bank's financial health was as
secure as it could be, just months before it was rescued by
rival Lloyds and propped up by a government bailout.
Dennis Stevenson said in a March 2008 letter to the
Financial Services Authority that the bank had bolstered its
resilience by adopting a "boringly boring" approach, slowing its
rate of new lending and building up deposits.
"We feel that HBOS, in this particular storm and given its
business characteristics, is in as safe a harbour as is possible
while at the same time feeling commercially rather frustrated,"
Stevenson said in a letter to FSA Chairman Callum McCarthy.
Stevenson, who was HBOS chairman between 2001 and 2009,
also said the bank was "feeling as robust as it is possible to
feel in a worrying environment".
Four months later, HBOS was forced into talks over a
government-engineered takeover by Lloyds, which subsequently
required a 20 billion pound ($32 billion) bailout to survive.
The letter was submitted as evidence ahead of Stevenson's
appearance before the Parliamentary Commission on Banking
Standards, which has set up a panel to examine the demise of
HBOS, once Britain's biggest mortgage provider, and to determine
what lessons can be learned to prevent future bank failures.
Stevenson apologised for the bank's errors at the end of a
three-and-a-half hour evidence session on Tuesday, during which
he had been accused by commission chairman Andrew Tyrie of being
"evasive, repetitive and unrealistic".
"I deeply regret the mistakes made in the corporate lending
book. With the benefit of hindsight I wish we could have done
things to obviate them," he said, after earlier appearing
irritated by the line of some of the questioning.
HIGH-RISK STRATEGY
HBOS was created through a merger between Halifax, a former
English building society, and the 300-year-old Bank of Scotland
in 2001. The bank expanded rapidly using cheap funding on the
wholesale markets rather than safer customer deposits. The
high-risk strategy was exposed when that funding dried up
following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.
In written evidence to the commission, Stevenson said the
bank had increased its corporate lending too aggressively in the
run-up to the financial crisis of 2008, contributing to its
near-collapse. Impairments on the bank's corporate loans hit 26
billion pounds in 2006.
"It is clear, with the benefit of hindsight, that mistakes
were made in the degree of corporate lending ... The Financial
Services Authority is almost certainly right to suggest that the
corporate division grew too quickly," he said.
However, he told the commission that the bank's demise was
fundamentally caused by the near-closure of wholesale funding
markets in 2008. He said it had taken steps to broaden the
nature of its funding and accelerate the rate of its deposit
growth to address long-term concerns about its reliance on
wholesale markets, but had not foreseen a short-term risk.
"We failed, along with rest of the world, to anticipate the
protracted closure of wholesale markets," Stevenson said.
"The worries we had were long-term worries. Had we thought
for a moment there would be protracted closure of wholesale
markets, we'd have been forced to take action."
Former Chief Executive James Crosby apologized for his role
in the affair when appearing before the commission on Monday.