Committee

It seems that the hapless executives at Northern Rock have upset the MPs on the Treasury Select Committee.  It seems that despite pay packets running into seven figures, they did not feel they could be held responsible for the fix the bank got into and they should keep their jobs.  Not surprisingly, this did not impress the committee investigating the first run on a British bank since the nineteenth century which heaped embarrassment on one of the world's leading finance economies.

In fact, it seems that Northern Rock fell over at the first sign of a crisis and, to most people, that would signal problems with its business model and failings at every management level to anticipate anything other than plain sailing in the credit markets.

Anyway, having managed to hoodwink the regulators, Northern Rock's Chief Executive, Adam Applegarth, seems not to have found such an impressionable bunch in the House of Commons.  That said, the MPs have the distinct benefit of hindsight and are prone to a degree of headline grabbing over reaction.

Once Northern Rock has been taken over, I would be surprised if the new owners decided that it would be in their interests to retain the current management.  I suspect that this saga will run for a while yet.