Paul Moore, whistleblower who exposed the financial misconduct of HBOS – obituary

Paul Moore, who has died of colitis aged 61, was a City whistleblower whose revelations foreshadowed the banking follies at the heart of the 2008 financial crash.

As a senior risk officer at Halifax Bank of Scotland in 2003, Moore became concerned that the bank was irresponsibly expanding its lendings to personal and corporate customers who would be incapable of repaying. Issuing repeated warnings to his bosses, he felt, he said, “like a man in a rowing boat trying to stop the Titanic heading for the iceberg”.

His complaints were eventually investigated by the accountancy firm KPMG (where Moore had previously worked), which reported that appropriate controls were in place – a conclusion endorsed at the time by the regulator, the Financial Services Authority.

But Moore refused to be silent, despite being “made to feel like toxic waste” by hostile colleagues. In November 2004 he was summoned by the HBOS chief executive James Crosby to be told that his career with the bank was over. He sued for wrongful dismissal, while Crosby was knighted and, having left HBOS in 2006, served as vice-chairman of the FSA.

By the autumn of 2008, however, HBOS’s recklessness had come home to roost: facing mounting bad debts and plunging investor confidence, it was forced into a merger with Lloyds shortly followed by a Treasury bail-out.

When senior HBOS executives were summoned before the Treasury select committee in February 2009, Moore submitted an explosive account of his ignored risk analysis and perceived mistreatment.

One consequence was the immediate resignation from the FSA of Crosby, who later forfeited his knighthood.

Moore’s initial reaction of “glee” at Crosby’s fall gave way to “a deep sense of sadness … I knew what was going to happen to the banking economy. Ordinary people were over-extending themselves with loans they should never have been given … I don’t see myself as prophet, and in a way I believe the world needed this crisis to bring it to its senses.”

Paul Russell Moore was born in Bristol on October 30 1958, the second of four children of Bernard Moore, a ceramics engineer, and his wife Jean, née Russell. Paul was educated at Ampleforth College in North Yorkshire, where he was a head of house and successful sportsman – and was strengthened in the Roman Catholic faith that sustained him in the troubles of his later life.

After reading Law at Bristol University, Moore trained and practised as a barrister before joining the legal department of the unit trust and financial advisory firm Allied Hambro, which became Allied Dunbar in 1985.

He left in 1988 for the City investment bank Kleinwort Benson and moved twice more before joining KPMG in 1995 as a partner advising FTSE 100 companies on compliance issues.

In 2002 he was headhunted into the recently merged HBOS as head of risk in the insurance and investment division, and swiftly promoted to head of group regulatory risk, running a department of 150 staff.

Initially all went well, until Moore’s natural outspokenness – characterised in a leaked internal report as “ranging from prickly to ranting to extraordinary and outrageous” – came to the fore.

The stress of these battles took a heavy toll on Moore’s mental health. He returned to live close to Ampleforth and was a strong supporter of its sister convent, Stanbrook Abbey. He published Crash, Bang, Wallop – both a personal memoir and a forensic analysis of HBOS’s faults – written with Mike Haworth in 2015. It begins with the words: “First and foremost, I give thanks to the Lord my God for everything that has happened …”

He is survived by his wife Maureen, who he met on a hang-gliding holiday in Chile in 1988, and by their daughter and two sons.

Paul Moore, born October 30 1958, died September 28 2020