Lloyds has been accused of “determined vandalism” after the banking group announced that it will sever its links with a charitable foundation that refused to accept a new funding deal.

The bank has told the Lloyds TSB Foundation for Scotland that it will terminate its legally binding covenant with the charity more than 25 years after it, and three other foundations, were set up around Britain when the TSB demutualised.

The decision follows a bitter dispute between the two organisations after Lloyds said it wanted to end the legal requirement to pay all four foundations 1% of its pre-tax profits, which has given them £370m since 1986. The foundations were set up instead of the TSB selling shares to its savers when it floated on the stock market. As a result, the Scottish foundation owns 15.7m limited voting shares that will become ordinary shares when the covenant ends. Severin Carrell, The Guardian.

So they can’t even give 1% of their profits to charity – what they want to give is half-a-percent – the others involved have capitulated – I guess they’ve to many bankers on their boards of trustees.

The foundations for England and Wales, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands agreed the new deal, which will cut their long-term funding by half to 0.5% of pre-tax profits and will also see Lloyds take greater control of their spending and policies. Lloyds will direct the foundations on where they should spend a “proportion” of their funds, but has refused to say how much that will be. Severin Carrell, The Guardian.

And what’s their reason for doing this?

Lloyds said the economic climate made the 1% agreement difficult to afford, while the expanded size of the bank, which now includes HBOS, meant that in future the foundations would receive far more income than was intended. Severin Carrell, The Guardian.

So it’s acceptable for bankers to get paid vast amounts of money when their gambles pay off – come to that they get paid whether their gambles pay off or not – but when a charity benefits from a gamble then that’s not acceptable – as I said at the top greed knows no bounds.