THERE was surprisingly little evidence that the financial turmoil had diminished the standing of our banking leaders at last week’s Insider magazine Elite corporate awards.

Most of the big names in banking were all still up there towards the top end of the Elite 100 list even if very few of them were actually present at the awards themselves. RBS chief executive Sir Fred Goodwin fell a whole two places to fourth while Andy Hornby and Peter Cummings of HBOS snuggled up to each other in joint seventh place despite being at the helm of a bank that virtually ran aground a few weeks ago.

Incredibly, Hornby fell only one place from his position last year but astonishingly Cummings leapfrogged from nowhere to enter the Elite 100 list, for the first time zooming ahead of his likely future bosses Susan Rice of Lloyds TSB and Archie Kane of Scottish Widows.

Almost half of the top 25 were in finance or connected to financial institutions. Not all have had as bad a year as HBOS but, in general, the problems in the finance sector are hard to reconcile with peer recognition.

What is going on? Are we all so in thrall to our financial sector that we have to laud them no matter what and a whole year of abject failure fails to shift our view?

I hope not. It is not as if there weren’t other strong contenders.

To name but a few, Mark Selway of The Weir Group (14th in the Elite 100 list) deserved more. He has taken it close to the FTSE 100 while Allister Langlands at Wood Group (18th) actually took that engineering company into the blue-chip elite, while Wilson Totten of ProStrakan will surely end much higher next year than the lowly 81st position he occupied.

Jim McColl bought Weir Pumps and completed a $1bn (£565m) US deal but somehow fell 16 places and Otto Thoresen of Aegon, one of the few people in the finance sector who has had a pretty good year on a number of fronts, failed to make the shortlist of any award.

I cannot imagine that the 2009 awards will be on similar lines even if dealing with the toxic debt in the US proves to be the turning point for the financial sector.

It was clear that in the US, many Americans were unhappy about bailing out Wall St, and we may see something similar if that happens here too, but it was the right thing to do. That does not mean that all is forgiven and forgotten.

Once the dust settles, it will be important to properly examine what went wrong. To help bring back full consumer confidence, those who made the biggest mistakes will have to be held to account.

What form that will take, I am not exactly sure, but at the very least I would like to see John McFall’s Treasury select committee use its powers to cross-examine in public the people whose decisions put many financial institutions in serious peril.

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