When the credit crunch started, one of the few big banks which looked as if it would survive was Lloyds TSB. It had been run prudently while others gambled - and lost - billions.

Today Lloyds is a financial disaster because bosses didn't do their homework before taking over the collapsing HBOS.

They wanted to create the biggest bank in Europe. Instead, they dug the deepest black hole in British commercial history. A pit into which the government is now pouring £260billion of taxpayers' money.

The disastrous merger - pushed through by Lloyds chairman Sir Victor Blank and the Prime Minister - is the latest example of failings at the top of British banking which include greed, incompetence, mis-judgment, short-sightedness and false pride.

None top the behaviour of Sir Fred Goodwin, former boss of RBS, who destroyed the bank yet now luxuriates on a pension of £13,000 a week. The latest discovery is that he lavished £7million a year on former sports stars.

One, Sir Jackie Stewart, was given more than £1million a year, a private plane, chauffeur-driven car and helicopter, for attending a small number of Formula One races. RBS clearly wasn't going to get value for money from such largesse.

Isn't throwing money around like that for no return swindling shareholders? And, presumably, ripping off customers with bigger bank charges to provide the money.

In America, such behaviour can lead bosses to be prosecuted with some ending up in jail. Not here, though. In Britain, they can create total disaster and still keep their massive pensions, knighthoods and peerages.

It really is way beyond time to get tough with the corporate mafia who run too much of British business.