[2] Born on 9 November 1942,[3] he was educated at Stockport Grammar School and then obtained an MA in Modern History at St Catherine's College, Oxford.
He left Clifford Turner in 1981 to become Head of Corporate Finance at Charterhouse Bank (now part of HSBC), where he masterminded the buyout of Woolworth's.
The letters represent a campaign on behalf of 7,000 private shareholders claiming compensation for their losses arising from the HBOS takeover.
Lloyds TSB stood out thanks to its conservative policies which had largely kept it out of the so-called "toxic securities" dealt in by other banks with riskier business models.
[17] Blank, on behalf of the Lloyds TSB board, talked to Prime Minister Gordon Brown about permitting the merger to go ahead.
However, due to the nature of the credit crisis and the need for immediate action to save HBOS, Gordon Brown said that he would waive the competition law and ensure the merger went through.
Because of the state of the financial markets at the time, if the merger had not gone ahead, there would have been an almost total meltdown of confidence in the British banking system as a whole.
[19] On 12 February 2009, the CEO of Lloyds group, Eric Daniels, was questioned about the banking crisis during a session of the Treasury Select Committee of the House of Commons.
[20] Blank confirmed in an August 2009 interview with the BBC's Business editor, Robert Peston[21] that losses had been "at the worst end of expectations".
[citation needed] Investors were angered at the decline in the share price and the substantial losses they were suffering coupled with Blank's dismissal of the notion of a dividend payment.
[23] On 17 May 2009, Blank announced that he would be retiring before the next Annual General Meeting and that Lloyds should immediately begin the process to find a successor.
Lord Butler, master of University College and former head of the Civil Service, said Blank 'had done a great job' for Oxford in his seven years on the council.
Lord Patten, Oxford's Chancellor, said Blank "had been an outstanding external member of the Council and we hope we can call on his support and expertise in the years to come.
He is also the chairman of various establishments including: The Social Mobility Foundation,[37] UJS Hillel, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists' health research charity, the Council of University College School and the European Advisory Board of the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business.
In early 2012, a group of Conservative party MPs suggested that Blank's role in the merger of Lloyds TSB and HBOS meant that he should be stripped of his knighthood.