Lloyds TSB’s announcement of its new senior lineup confirms what has been suspected for weeks. Most of the top managers at its takeover partner, HBOS, are surplus to requirements and will probably be eased out.

On the surface, they appear to be due several million pounds in severance payments if they are pushed out. But HBOS and Lloyds have both promised the Treasury as a condition of accepting taxpayer money that there will be no rewards paid to failing executives. Unless, like their boss Andy Hornby, the outgoing executives choose to waive their contractual rights, a stinker of a row looks possible.

The HBOS Six are not obvious candidates for either public sympathy or shareholder sympathy. Five are main board directors and so have to shoulder ultimate responsibility for destruction of value on a Brobdingnagian scale. More than £45 billion has been wiped from the bank’s worth in the past 18 months. Even company destroyers of the stature of John Mayo of Marconi or Roy Ranson at Equitable Life look mere sledgehammer wielders beside the wrecking ball of the HBOS board.

Inadvertently they have all but ruined two great financial institutions – Bank of Scotland and Halifax Building Society. It is even possible that their past actions will ultimately sink a third: the sceptics believe that lurking within HBOS’s vast asset base may be enough problem loans to finish off Lloyds too, or at least force it to return to the Government for yet more public money.

The upfront cost to taxpayers already almost certainly runs to scores of billions of pounds. The Treasury is committed to putting in £3 billion in preference shares and up to £8.5 billion in ordinary shares. On top, much more has been borrowed via the Bank of England’s liquidity hosepipe.

Some of the six look more culpable than others. The business lending chief, Peter Cummings, was still spraying loans at property entrepreneurs as late as February this year. Colin Matthew, as head of treasury, looks responsible for HBOS’s suicidal plunge into structured credit.

Most of them were big HBOS shareholders and have already suffered financially, but if any of them were to get a penny, many would construe the payments as rewards for failure, rewards ultimately bankrolled by taxpayers. Who handles this hottest of potatoes depends on whether the surplus executives – if they go at all – go before or after the takeover is completed.

It may be that the payoffs are not disclosed. If the executives leave before completion, HBOS will cease to exist and so will never publish the annual report in which any payoffs would otherwise be disclosed. If they go after completion, they will not be Lloyds directors and so their payoffs will not have to be disclosed at all.

It would be disgraceful if the rules were wriggled round to keep any payoffs secret. It would also mean that both the concessions wrestled from the banks by the Treasury as a condition of the £37 billion rescue package this month are meaningless.

The pledge to maintain lending levels at 2007 levels we know is bogus. The promise not to give rewards for boardroom failure would start to look threadbare too.

As Jonathan Ross is discovering at the BBC, taxpayers’ willingness to pay sky-high salaries to people they deem have let them down is diminishing by the day.

The public mood is changing as fast as the economic temperature. HBOS needs to take careful note of that.

Times Recommends

• Lies and cover-up at MG Rover exposed by report
• High oil prices push manufacturing costs up
• Primark founder steps down as chief executive