The Fraud We Don’t Prosecute – Because It Wears a Suit and Writes the Rules

What the Lloyds/HBOS and Post Office scandals reveal about Britain’s “too big to prosecute” economy – and why we must build something better.

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When fraud kicks in your door and steals £50,000, blue lights arrive.

When fraud walks through the back door of a bank and steals £50 million, nobody comes.

That, in essence, was the message from former Thames Valley Police & Crime Commissioner Anthony Stansfeld at a recent Parliament event chaired by Lord Prem Sikka, with contributions from campaigners, victims, former regulators, and experts. The focus was nominally “crime in the City of London”. In reality, it was something bigger:

How a whole system quietly decides that some forms of fraud will never be properly investigated – if the perpetrators are large enough, well-connected enough, and embedded deeply enough in the establishment.

This blog pulls together the key threads from that event and asks a hard question:

If our official systems will not protect people from structural financial harm, what will?

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1. Post Office vs Banks: Same Pattern, Different Scale

The public only truly woke up to the Post Office Horizon scandal when it became television.

Yet, as Stansfeld pointed out, it had been known about for years:

• Sub-postmasters were dragged before the courts,
• Wrongfully convicted and imprisoned,
• Financially and psychologically destroyed,
• While the institution insisted the system was sound.

When you listen to victims of banking fraud, you hear the same structure:

• Long-known wrongdoing at scale,
• Repeated internal warnings and whistleblowers,
• Institutional denial, delay, and legal aggression,
• A system more focused on protecting itself than correcting harm.

The key difference?

• Post Office losses: hundreds of millions.
• Banking frauds: billions, involving thousands of businesses and families.

The Post Office scandal is not a freak exception.
It is a template of how powerful institutions behave when their own systems become the crime scene.

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2. The Lloyds/HBOS Reading Case – The Tip of a Much Larger Iceberg

The Lloyds/HBOS Reading fraud is the only major UK banking scandal to result in serious criminal convictions.

Even there, the picture is sobering:

• Six bankers received sentences totalling 49 years.
• The prosecution focused on ~£245 million.
• Stansfeld and others estimate the true fraud at £800m to £1bn+.
• And they insist Reading was not an isolated rogue unit, but a window into a wider pattern at Lloyds and elsewhere.

Thames Valley Police only took the case after:

• Two other forces declined it.
• The Serious Fraud Office refused it.

The investigation:

• Cost Thames Valley Police around £7m.
• Yielded an FCA fine on Lloyds of £65m, reduced to £45m “for cooperation”.
• Sent that entire fine to the Treasury – not back to the force that took the risk to prosecute.

The message to every Chief Constable in the country?

“Take on a major bank and you’ll be outgunned legally, underfunded financially, and politically isolated. Don’t do it.”

So they largely don’t.

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3. How Banking Fraud Actually Works in Practice

One of the most useful parts of the event was not abstract theory, but modi operandi – how the frauds are actually done.

Common themes emerged across Lloyds, HBOS, RBS/GRG, and others:

3.1 Forged & fabricated documents

Victims repeatedly report:

• Forged signatures on guarantees, loans, and hedging agreements.
• Loans or financial instruments opened in their name without their knowledge.
• Cases where the “signatory” was literally in another country on the date of the alleged signature.

A chilling anecdote from the floor:

• A hedging product of around £4m was placed on a customer’s account.
• The “signed” document was only obtained many years later.
• It turned out the customer was not even in the UK on the date it was supposedly executed.

Yet – in case after case – regulators and enforcement bodies decline to treat these as criminal frauds, instead leaving victims to fight in the civil courts against fully-armed bank legal teams.

3.2 “Support units” that actually harvest assets

Both Lloyds and RBS maintained “support” functions:

• Lloyds BSU (Business Support Unit)
• RBS GRG (Global Restructuring Group)

On paper:
They help distressed businesses restructure and recover.

In reality (according to victims, whistleblowers and expert witnesses):

• These units became profit centres,
• Targeting companies with tangible assets – property, land, cashflows –
• Pushing them into manufactured distress,
• Then using the distressed position to seize or strip assets at fire-sale valuations.

The logic is simple and brutal:

It is far more profitable to take down a solvent business with strong assets over a small engineered loan or derivative, than it is to try to rescue it.

Performance-related pay and internal incentives rewarded this behaviour.
Fraud wasn’t a bug; it was a feature of the model.

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4. NDAs: The Price of Getting Your Own Money Back

A particularly stark theme was the weaponisation of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).

The pattern:

• Internal reports like Sally Masterton’s (on Lloyds/HBOS) are commissioned, then suppressed.
• Whistleblowers who tell the truth are:
  • Sidelined,
  • Sacked or marginalised,
  • Forced to sign NDAs as the price of their own compensation.
• Victims themselves are routinely told: You can have some of your money back – if you sign an NDA and help us keep this out of the public domain.

Stansfeld’s words cut through:

“If you want your money back that we’ve stolen from you, you’ve got to sign an NDA. There’s something very wrong there.”

NDAs in this context do not protect trade secrets.
They protect abuse of power.

They are a structural tool for burying systemic wrongdoing and ensuring patterns never surface as case law, precedent, or public record.

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5. Regulators, Enforcers, and “Action Fraud” That Doesn’t Act

The event made it painfully clear that victims are not just up against banks – they’re up against an ecosystem.

5.1 FCA – “woefully inadequate” and strategically mis-used

A former FCA employee described the Authority as:

• Lacking the expertise and capacity to match the complexity of the firms it regulates.
• Making astonishing appointments – for example:
  • A second-year graduate trainee as lead regulator for one of the UK’s biggest insurers.

Others emphasised:

• Andrew Bailey, as FCA CEO, repeatedly declined to take up serious banking fraud cases.
• The FCA’s culture and structure seemed oriented more towards:
  • Managing reputation and market “confidence”
    than
  • Exposing deep misconduct and securing justice.

5.2 NCA, SFO and Bank of England – passing the parcel

Repeated themes:

• The National Crime Agency:
  • Given cases with clear evidence of forged documents,
  • Picked a tiny sample,
  • Declared “no clear fraud”,
  • Often without interviewing victims.
• The Serious Fraud Office:
  • Too small, too stretched, frequently passes on major banking cases.
• The Bank of England:
  • Seen as more focused on protecting the system than confronting systemic crime within it.

And crucially, several of these bodies are:

Financially sponsored by the very banks they are supposed to investigate.

This is not impartial oversight; it is structural conflict of interest.

5.3 City of London Police & Action Fraud

The picture painted was stark:

• City of London Police, historically “the fraud police”, now routes most cases to Action Fraud.
• Action Fraud is essentially:
  • A call centre in Glasgow,
  • Logging reports, but not investigating.
• Both CoL Police and Action Fraud reportedly receive funding from Lloyds and others.

Victims see:

• Thousands of reports filed.
• Vanishingly few fully investigated.
• A system that absorbs complaints and converts them into silence.

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6. Professional Enablers: Lawyers, Insolvency Practitioners, Ombudsmen

It isn’t just banks.

The meeting heard evidence about:

• Family court and Novitas loans:
  • Legal Ombudsman upholding complaints but refusing to publish decisions,
  • Allowing law firms to avoid public accountability.
• Insolvency practitioners:
  • Weaponised to convert contested debts into complete loss of homes and businesses.
• Law Society and Bar Council:
  • Described by multiple speakers as unfit for purpose, failing to regulate or discipline those who enable systemic asset stripping.

Even where complaints bodies uphold individual cases, they often:

• Keep decisions secret,
• Prevent journalists from naming wrongdoers,
• And thereby protect the business model, not the public.

It is all one system.

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7. Parliamentary Reality: Why “Write to Your MP” Is Not Enough

Lord Prem Sikka gave a rare, honest insight into the limits of parliamentary capacity:

• Lords often have:
  • No researchers,
  • Shared offices,
  • No admin support,
  • Hundreds of pages of legislation to review alone.
• House of Lords:
  • No direct equivalent to MP adjournment debates.
  • Very limited speaking time in crowded debates.
• Real leverage often comes from:
  • Select Committee evidence (which automatically goes on the public record),
  • MPs securing 30-minute adjournment debates where ministers must respond.

This isn’t an excuse; it’s context:

Our formal democracy was not designed for systemic, financialised crime of this complexity – nor for an era where regulator, enforcer, and regulated are so tightly interwoven.

Which raises the question:

If the formal system struggles to cope, what can citizens do?

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8. From Extraction to Empowerment: What AoLP Takes From This

At the Academy of Life Planning, we approach this from a different angle.

We are not a regulator.
We don’t run prosecutions.
We can’t rewrite the Companies Act.

But we can do three things:

8.1 Expose structural untrustworthiness

The stories in that room are not “one-offs”. They are symptoms of:

• A financial system where:
  • Products are prioritised over people,
  • Intermediaries extract value without true accountability,
  • “Support units” are monetised distress machines.
• A legal and regulatory system where:
  • Power is concentrated,
  • Oversight is captured,
  • Complexity is used as camouflage.

Our work on Structural Trustworthiness is about giving planners and citizens:

• A language to describe these patterns,
• Tools to evaluate the trust structure behind any product or institution,
• The confidence to say no to arrangements that rely on opacity and blind faith.

8.2 Shift from dependence to self-agency

The event makes one thing painfully clear:

If your only protection is “the system will eventually sort it out”, you are frighteningly exposed.

So we work on a different foundation:

• Planning My Life – helping individuals become their own planners, so they:
  • Understand their rights,
  • Read documents critically,
  • See red flags before they sign.
• Financial Life Coach – supporting those who need a professional ally:
  • Without product bias,
  • Without AUM-linked conflicts,
  • With a commitment to structural trust.
• Get SAFE – helping victims of financial exploitation:
  • Become Citizen Investigators,
  • Use AI and structured tools to organise evidence,
  • Communicate clearly and professionally with regulators, courts, and the press.

If you cannot safely rely on captured institutions to “do the right thing”, you must develop your own capacity to:

• Understand your position,
• Document your case,
• Navigate complex systems with clarity and persistence.

8.3 Build an alternative professional culture

The stories you’ve just read are, in part, the result of a professional culture:

• Where the “best and brightest” are rewarded for:
  • Structuring opacity,
  • Extracting value quietly,
  • Using law as a shield, not as truth-finding.

AoLP exists to nurture a different type of professional:

• Total Wealth Planners who see themselves as:
  • Guardians of financial sovereignty,
  • Defenders against structural abuse,
  • Educators and advocates, not product distributors.
• Planners who:
  • Place human capital and purpose before products,
  • Operate transparently,
  • Refuse conflicted incentives,
  • Stand with clients before, during, and after harm.

We are building – slowly, imperfectly, but relentlessly – a movement of modern-day “superheroes” who are willing to stand on the right side of history.

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9. What Needs to Change – And Where We Start

The Parliament event surfaced several concrete reforms worth supporting:

• Ring-fenced funding for major economic crime investigations, with fines returned to the investigating forces, not swallowed by Treasury.
• An end to regulator and enforcement sponsorship by regulated firms.
• Strict limitation or banning of NDAs where fraud, public interest, or regulatory failure is involved.
• Mandatory interim reports within one year for public inquiries.
• Public reporting of Ombudsman systemic decisions (with privacy protected), so patterns cannot be buried.

These are important campaigns. They deserve attention, pressure, and persistence.

But while we fight for those changes, people will still:

• Sign documents they don’t fully understand,
• Be steered into opaque products by conflicted “advisers”,
• Meet a wall of silence when things go wrong.

So our starting point, at the Academy, is simple and radical:

We plan life before we plan money.
We build human capital before we hand over financial capital.
And we teach people to see and refuse structures that are designed to extract rather than empower.

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10. Where You Fit In

If you have read this far, you’re likely one of three people:

1. A planner or professional who is deeply uncomfortable with how the system operates, and wants to work in a way that enhances structural trust, not colludes with its absence.
2. A citizen or business owner who senses that the game is rigged and wants tools to protect yourself, your family, or your clients.
3. A victim or whistleblower who has seen the inside of this machine and refuses to accept that “nothing can be done”.

You are not powerless.
You are not alone.
But you will need different tools, different allies, and a different story than the one the mainstream system sells you.

At the Academy of Life Planning, we are:

• Training planners to become Total Wealth Planners, not product vendors.
• Equipping individuals to design their own GAME Plan, not outsource their life decisions.
• Supporting victims through Get SAFE to become credible, organised, AI-enabled citizen investigators.

If you want to explore this further – as a professional, as a citizen, or as someone already in the fight – reach out.

Because the fraud we don’t prosecute is not going away by itself.
But together, we can build an economy where structural trustworthiness is the norm, not the exception – and where ordinary people no longer have to stand alone against institutions that have forgotten what justice looks like.