How Lloyds picked our pocket

Lloyds has admitted to ripping off the taxpayer despite the bank having been bailed out with public funds.

Lloyds is being fined £218m as part of a settlement with UK and US authorities. It admitted fiddling the rates used to calculate its fees for accessing the Bank of England's Special Liquidity Scheme (SLS) during the 2008-09 financial crisis.

The SLS was a crucial funding lifeline, allowing the banks to borrow when the interbank market dried up. The rate used to calculate the charge was the repo rate, at which the government buys back government securities from commercial banks.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.