Chancellor may soon start to recoup £20bn spent rescuing lender

Lloyds TSB and Bank of Scotland also at the top of the list in the table of shame

Mike Benson thought, as the owner of a profitable small business, a £10,000 loan for a new Ford Transit van wouldn’t be too much to ask.

Complaints to the Financial Ombudsman more than doubled in the second half of 2012 to a record 283,251, a 110 per cent increase over the first six months.

Lloyds Banking Group received almost 1.4 million complaints about mis-sold payment protection insurance in 2012, it has admitted. The bank was fined £4.3m last week after it failed to pay compensation quickly enough to tens of thousands of PPI victims, yet it declared it has made "significant progress" on dealing with customer complaints.

New figures suggest that buying a house is more affordable than renting in all UK regions

Eight people have been charged in connection with a series of fraudulent business loans made through a high-street bank to the value of about £35m.

Rubislaw Den South in Aberdeen comes second with an average price of £1,455,000

Today

Ex-HBOS chief admits selling two-thirds of holding in two years before near-collapse

Two former bosses of HBOS, the bank which had to be bailed out by the government and taken over by Lloyds at the height of the financial crisis, today admitted that it had taken greater risks than it should.

A five-star golf resort in Northern Ireland that has been in administration for over 18 months  with debts of £26 million, and regarded as a high-profile example of the worst excesses of Ireland’s banking crisis, will play host next year to eight of the world’s richest nations.

So Scotland gets its referendum on independence. The general perception is that the debate will now switch to the economics of it all. It is a perception given a certain spice by an opinion poll suggesting that if Scots felt they would be £500 a year a head better off they would vote in favour, and if the same amount worse off they would vote against.