A banker has been banned from any senior banking position in the UK and fined a record £500,000 by the The Financial Services Authority (FSA) for his part in the collapse of Halifax Bank of Scotland.
Peter Cummings, was the head of corporate banking at HBOS, and was behind many of the bank's high-profile deals, before it had to be bailed out by the taxpayer.
A general view of the Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) headquarters in Edinburgh Credit: Danny Lawson/PA Wire
The FSA said Cummings had failed to exercise enough care and attention in his corporate division while it pursued an aggressive expansion strategy.
But Mr Cummings, who is the only man to be sanctioned by the FSA over the HBOS collapse, branded the three-year FSA probe as "an Orwellian process by an organisation that acts as lawmaker, judge, jury, appeal court and executioner".
Halifax in Canada is home to 150 graves of Titanic passengers. Credit: ITV News
The Atlantic Canadian port city of Halifax had to deal with the ghastly aftermath of a calamity that killed about 1,500 people.
It was Halifax that sent out ships to pick up the bodies, turned an ice rink into a morgue and interred the dead in three cemeteries.
"They built it in Belfast, sank it in the Atlantic and we buried it. In that sense, one very final part of the Titanic story is right here in Halifax," says local author Alan Ruffman.
The story of the Titanic still resonates in Halifax, which has many visible reminders of what was the worst peacetime maritime disaster ever: 150 graves, more than 20 sites linked to the recovery effort and dozens of artifacts.
