None of the standard terms cover the mammoth scam at HBOS that has been revealed this week. Victimless crime? But there were victims of this £245m crime, in the form of British taxpayers, business customers of the bank itself, and shareholders and employees of the company. Fraud? Here the bankers weren’t getting one over on their bosses – because the bosses were barely watching. Rotten apples? Except the bank itself launched investigation after investigation, yet continued to play down the full scale of the abuse. What happened at HBOS should not be minimised. The crimes that have been publicised this week give the public a rare glimpse into just how much went wrong in the UK’s banking system at the height of the bubble. They should also prompt questions about just how far Britain is protected from another financial crisis.

Cash, cruises and sex parties: inside ex-HBOS manager's £245m scam Read more

The shocking details should not distract us from the bigger picture – but the details that have emerged over the four-month trial are lurid indeed. Between 2003 and 2007 – that is, at the very peak of the biggest financial bubble ever – a senior banker at HBOS took thousands of pounds in brown envelopes, enjoyed sex parties and went on free trips to Barbados and Cannes. The recipient of these lavish bribes was Lynden Scourfield, whose role was to lend HBOS’s money to businesses. In return, all Scourfield had to do was use his position to demand his clients hire the people bribing him as advisers. Quayside Corporate Services was a consultancy run by David Mills that claimed it helped struggling businesses.

In some cases, the jury was told, Mills and his associates took control of the struggling firms – and ran them for their own benefit. In this way a key part of one of the biggest names in banking went rogue. When Lloyds Banking Group took over HBOS, it wrote off £245m related to customers under Scourfield’s management.

Central to this story, and to the entire banking crisis, is institutions trying to get big fast. Halifax had been a provincial building society. Bank of Scotland was a major presence on the Scottish high street, but not down south. The combined entity was a massive mortgage lender, but it was a minnow in business lending – making up 3% of the market in England and Wales. A regulator’s report into the collapse of HBOS, published at the end of 2015, observes that between 2004 and 2008 the corporate division grew at an annual rate of 12% a year – far outpacing the bank’s overall growth.

In other words, Scourfield’s predatory practices were just one way this bank bought growth. The growth was too fast and too much – but most of all it was based on lies. Sometimes the lies were outrageous, as with the nonsense loans made by Scourfield to keep his bribers sweet. Sometimes, the lies were fantasies about the prospects for both the UK and HBOS. Either way, when the entire system came crashing down between 2007 and 2008, it was taxpayers who had to fork out hundreds of billions for all these lies. And in the austerity years since, it has been the working poor and the young who have had to pay for the recklessness of bankers.

Could it happen again? The UK has engineered a recovery based on bank lending and house prices. We are, once again, buying growth. Less than a decade from the crash, the bankers are once again demanding preferential treatment on Brexit. Sadly, the answer must be: yes.