THE risk control department at HBOS was run by Evel Knievel for nearly a decade, it emerged last night.
Former executives revealed how the late US daredevil would approve multi-billion pound transactions while snorting cocaine off the buttocks of the prostitute he had been with drinking with all night.
Tom Logan, a former HBOS accountant, said: "From about 1999 onwards the bank's business model was based very closely on Mr Knievel's book Jumping the Grand Canyon on a Rocket Bike: A New Approach to Financial Risk.
"He rubber-stamped all the major deals. I remember how it was always slightly awkward going into his office, what with all the skanks and whores.
"We would give him a quick summary of the proposed transaction and then he'd bang the table and shout, 'fuck this pansy-ass shit, let's fucking do it!' before picking up a Jack Daniels bottle and throwing it in the direction of our heads."
Logan added: "Sometimes he was more reflective and he would tell us about one of the many times he had broken every bone in his body.
"He'd say, 'guys you don't wind up with 14 pins in your head and a chronic addiction to pain medicine by adhering to the standard banking model of using savers' deposits to fund prudent and responsible loans.
"Then he'd tell us to go out there and 'jump our own Snake River Canyon', but instead of a rocket bike we'd be using 'millions and millions of pounds that would never appear on the balance sheet'. He was an incredibly dangerous man."
Meanwhile prime minister Gordon Brown last night pledged to crackdown on bank bonuses in his latest attempt to blame all of this on someone else.
