The Office of Fair Trading stokes... but not quite like Zorro

[Jan Klimkowski]

Yup.

£20 billion stolen from British taxpayers.

This Master of the Universe will sacrifice his knighthood but thinks he still deserves a pension of over £400k a year.

As austerity bites, repeat after me: "We're all in this together."

Once a lie, always a lie.

Sir James Crosby, the former boss of HBOS, has asked for his knighthood to be revoked after a scathing report by MPs found that he sowed the "seeds of destruction" at one of Britain's biggest banks.

Crosby was chief executive of HBOS until 2006, but was described as the architect of a strategy that just two years later led to the bank having to be rescued by Lloyds and eventually bailed out with £20bn of taxpayers' money.

He said he was "deeply sorry" for his role in HBOS's failure and asked for his knighthood to be removed. He is believed to be the first person to have voluntarily offered to hand back a knighthood. The 57-year-old chose to give up the honour, granted in 2006, rather than face the prospect of being stripped of it as Fred Goodwin, the former boss of RBS was last year.

Crosby also offered to hand back 30% of his £580,000-a-year pension. He will still collect £406,000 annually in pension payments 80 times as much as the average private sector worker. On Tuesday he also quit his £125,000-a-year role on the board of catering company Compass.