Does HBoS's Hornby Deserve a Second Chance?
Business can sometimes be surprisingly forgiving.
It's barely six months since the UK government had to rescue Royal Bank of Scotland and HBoS, sacking the chief executives and subjecting them to a public grilling and a regulatory investigation.
But while former RBS chief executive, Sir Fred Goodwin, is vilified and fights to retain his pension, Andy Hornby, HBoS's ex-CEO, is back in business big time. Hornby is the new chief executive of Alliance Boots, a £20bn turnover pharmaceutical retailer and wholesaler.
The criticism of Hornby as a banker was that he was a retailer. He spent three years at Asda, Wal-Mart's UK supermarket subsidiary, before joining HBoS to run its retail banking.
He is a non-executive director of Home Retail, which owns the UK Homebase and Argos store chains. And it was because Boots tried to recruit him three years ago that HBoS promoted him to chief executive aged 38.
Running HBoS as though it was a retailer contributed to the bank's problems but those are the skills Alliance Boots wants.
It employs 115,000 staff, has 3,200 stores and supplies 140,000 doctors, hospitals and other healthcare customers. Hornby's time at Boston Consulting Group and his Harvard MBA enhances his CV.
Former Asda chief executive Tony De Nunzio, now an Alliance Boots director, will welcome back his former colleague.
Yet there is a faction still seeking to punish the bankers that got the financial system -- and the economy -- into such a mess and which will cost taxpayers billions over decades.
HBoS not only provided unsecured consumer credit, as Britain's biggest provider of home loans it directly fuelled the UK housing bubble as well as investing heavily in US sub-prime mortgage securities.
Not only was HBoS brought down, Lloyds was severely damaged by taking it over as part of the rescue. But while Lloyds' chairman has lost his job over the deal, Hornby has gained a new position.
It is questionable whether Hornby would be able to take a new job in financial services where regulators vet senior appointments. And it is questionable if City investors would welcome his return to a quoted company, fearing his presence and continued adverse publicity could damage the share price.
So Hornby is lucky that after Boots merged with Alliance UniChem it was taken private two years ago in an £11bn bid backed by buy-out house KKR.
The credit crisis has hit the value of the deal's equity as well as the banks that financed it, but Alliance Boots has no public investors to question Hornby's appointment, no share price to react and no credit rating on its large debts.
But if he can return it to a sizeable company, is there hope for the other bankers forced out by the crunch -- or the heads of collapsed motor companies and retailers?
And if there is no punishment for heading a bank that fails on such scale or damage to personal reputation, why be more careful in future? Alliance Boots' forgiveness does not reflect the demand for retribution felt by the wider world.