UK banks pin Brexit hopes on financial crisis bailout negotiator

London

IN early October 2008, then business minister Shriti Vadera called a secret meeting of bankers and government officials on the top floor of Standard Chartered's City of London headquarters to address Britain's biggest peacetime crisis.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers two weeks earlier - the biggest bankruptcy in history - had caused UK credit markets to seize up and pushed some of Britain's biggest high street lenders, including Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and HBOS, to the brink of implosion.