One of the biggest stories of the day is the Supreme Court ruling that banks can carry on charging big fees on personal overdrafts.
This is rich in irony given an apparent revelation in the House of Commons an hour ago. Vince Cable pressed Alistair Darling over the issue of the £61bn emergency loans to HBOS and RBS. Were the banks charged interest, he demanded?
There was a fee of £18m, the chancellor said. But he dodged the bigger question of interest – leaving the impression that the banks had escaped hundreds of millions of pounds of payments to the government.
Instead, said Darling, the most important point was that the taxpayer had got the money back in full by January. And the wider financial system had been saved.
Maybe: But the public is unlikely to be amused by the news.
UPDATE
About-turn. I’ve just spoken to someone in the know and it turns out that in fact the banks were charged a “penal” rate by the Bank of England. Still not quite clear why the chancellor didn’t just come out and say this in the Commons.
FURTHER UPDATE
The other interesting line to emerge from the debate was over the Lloyds TSB rescue takeover of HBOS. Lloyds’ shareholders had been blissfully unaware of the secret emergency loan from the government.
Darling insisted, again and again, that the decision on whether or not to inform shareholders of the HBOS secret loan was not his: it was the responsibility of Lloyds’ directors.
Nothing to do with the potential legal action by Lloyds shareholders?
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey
