LONDON, Feb 10: Chiefs of two leading UK banks tendered on Tuesday their profound apologies live in front of television cameras for the credit crunch and events leading to the debacle of financial market.

They were grilled closely by members of the Treasury select committee in what appeared to be a public hearing witnessed by millions of television viewers.

Sir Fred Goodwin and Sir Tom McKillop, the former chief executive and chairman of RBS respectively, and Andy Hornby and Lord Stevenson, the former chief executive and chairman of HBOS, apologised to the MPs for failing to prevent the circumstances which led their banks having to be bailed out with taxpayers’ money. The four made their comments at the opening of a hearing that saw them being accused by MPs of living in denial, destroying great British institutions and – in one case – having a “different moral compass” from other people.

During the session, the four former executives insisted that they were not alone in failing to anticipate the scale of the global financial crisis that led to their banks having to be rescued by the taxpayers. But they did offer cautious support for an overhaul of the City bonus culture.

The bankers also agreed that the City bonus system needed to be reviewed.

Goodwin and McKillop were also asked about RBS’s decision to buy the Dutch bank ABN Amro, which led to RBS having to write off £20bn. Michael Fallon, a Tory member of the committee, told McKillop: “You have destroyed a great British bank. You have cost the taxpayer £20bn.”

McKillop said: “The deal was a bad mistake. At the time it did not look like that ... There was widespread support for it.”

The bankers came under a particularly fierce grilling from John Mann, a Labour member of the committee.

Addressing Goodwin, Mann asked him whether he had a “different moral compass” from other people. He also asked him if his integrity and ethics were representative of the banking profession as a whole.

Goodwin replied: “Reflecting on everything that has happened, I think there is a case for questioning some of the [decisions] that I have made. I’m not aware of any basis for questioning my integrity as a result of it all.”

During the hearing, Goodwin insisted that nobody in the financial services industry had anticipated a crisis of the kind that occurred.

“I’ve gone over this time and time and time and time again in my mind as to what was the point at which we should have seen this differently,” Goodwin said.

“And I come back to that, at the time, there was a view - not that things would continue forever - there was a definite mood that the economy in this country and generally was going to slow down, that the financial markets were going to slow down, but at no point did anyone get the scale or the speed of this, and that was what was so damaging about this slowdown.

“It wasn’t that our business was premised on everything continuing to go upwards forever.

“But that things could turn as quickly as they did, I don’t think anyone saw, and I don’t think, in fairness to the Bank of England, that they really saw it was going to turn this quickly.

“I think everyone saw it was going to come at some point but for it to turn in the way it has and so profoundly and globally is the part that has caught everyone out. It was not possible at the time to envisage.”