I am Mr. Bates of banking… and we HBoS victims are still fighting for justice

When Paul Turner watched the hit ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office, he had an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. “The parallels are incredible,” he says.

Like Alan Bates, Turner and his wife Nikki have been campaigning for years on behalf of victims seeking redress for a major corporate scandal that has gone on for far too long.

And like the heroic former sub-postmaster Alan Bates, the Turners are still waiting for closure to the infamous HBoS Reading affair more than twenty years later.

So does he see himself in the same mold as Bates?

“Probably so,” he says with a rueful laugh – before revealing he is in advanced talks with the same production company behind the ITV programme.

He says the working title of the proposed drama documentary is Erin Brockovich Versus the Wolf of Wall Street, which will cast him as underdog lawyer Erin Brockovich and HBoS owner Lloyds as the predatory Wolf of Wall Street. Maybe it will be renamed The Mr Bates of Banking.

The Turners’ story begins in 2003, when the couple took out a £160,000 loan for their publishing company Zenith from the Reading arm of HBoS.

A year later they were introduced to a business consultancy – Quayside Corporate Services – when senior HBoS manager Lynden Scourfield began managing their account.

Little did they know it, but they were about to become victims of a £245 million fraud orchestrated by Scourfield and QCS that would destroy dozens of small businesses like theirs and destroy the lives and livelihoods of thousands of others destroy.

The Turners had to pay monthly fees to QCS amounting to thousands of pounds, causing huge damage to their business.

In return, Scourfield received kickbacks from QCS, including lavish foreign holidays and romps with sex workers.

In 2007, the Turners smelled a rat and alerted the bank – and later the police.

Despite mounting evidence of misconduct, the Turners say the bank continued to harass them and tried to evict them from their bungalow near Newmarket, Cambridgeshire, 22 times over a three-year period.

It wasn’t until ten years later that Scourfield and five associates were each sentenced to twelve years in prison for the enormous scam. The charges included conspiracy to commit corruption, fraudulent trading and related money laundering offences.

Corrupt: Lynden Scourfield, right, with fellow financiers on a lavish vacation

At Scourfield’s sentencing, the judge told him he had sold his “soul for sex, for luxury travel with and without your wife, for bling and for swag,” adding that he was a “completely corrupt bank manager.”

Following the convictions, a number of investigations were launched by Lloyds Banking Group, which had acquired HBoS in 2009 during the banking crisis.

These include a review of all cases – including those involving the Turners – that may have been affected by criminal activity linked to the scandal at the Reading branch.

Hit show: Toby Jones stars as Mr Bates in the ITV drama

The affected bank customers were promised ‘fast and fair’ compensation.

Lloyds later settled with the Turners for an undisclosed sum and apologized for the ‘significant personal distress’ they had faced.

The bank also recognized the ‘critical role for more than a decade’ played by the couple and their efforts to ‘tirelessly campaign for justice for all victims of the criminal behavior at HBoS Reading’.

The Turners’ story may have ended there, but another bizarre chapter was about to begin. In 2019, Lloyds launched an independent review – led by Sir Ross Cranston – of its first redress scheme. Cranston discovered a number of shortcomings.

Lloyds also launched another investigation, this time chaired by former High Court judge Dame Linda Dobbs, into whether the bank covered up the fraud – and what senior executives, including former boss Sir Antonio Horta-Osorio, knew about it. This review has yet to report – or even set a publication date – seven years after it was commissioned. And a reassessment of the compensation scheme has still not seen the light of day.

“I handed Dobbs hundreds of thousands of documents and emails in 2018,” said Turner, who continues to fight for other victims.

Turner blames Lloyds for cheating and some individuals for refusing to give evidence.

Dobbs has no power to compel witnesses and says she has experienced “significant delays in completing interviews with a number of key witnesses,” which had a “material impact” on the completion of her investigation. Turner says: ‘It has been covered up at the highest level for years. We were considered collateral damage.”

Lawyer Jonathan Coad told the Mail on Sunday: ‘One of my clients for whom I am still fighting Lloyds is terminally ill with cancer and may not live to receive compensation.’

Turner’s wife Nikki is also seriously ill. She suffered a stroke that her husband said was caused by the stress of the situation.

The bank has offered each fraud victim £3 million tax-free under a second compensation scheme, but around 100 claimants are yet to accept the offer or receive the fixed reward.

The pressure on Dobbs to publish her report is growing. Mark Brown, general secretary of the BTU banking union, has written to Dobbs: ‘People have been left mentally and physically scarred and financially ruined.’

Turner says, “We don’t give up. We’ll get it over the line.’

He said he still has “confidence” in Dobbs’ review and hopes she will complete her interviews “in the coming weeks.” But Nikki insists: ‘No, they don’t.’

Lloyds says it has paid out more than £100 million to victims. A spokesperson said: ‘We have publicly apologized to all customers affected… for the time it has taken to compensate them.’

A spokesperson for the Dobbs Review was contacted for comment.