Scottish jobs might be being given preferential treatment as Lloyds TSB’s takeover of HBOS looms, but could this nail-biting wait over a potential 40,000 redundancies been avoided? An increasing number of industry players are creeping out of the woodwork and claiming that perhaps it could have survived after all.

It turns out that last Wednesday, as speculation over HBOS’s future mounted and its shares were subjected to a barrage of selling and shorting, 10 leading investment houses were on the verge of publishing a statement of support for the bank. But Lloyds TSB got in first.

The latest high-profile investor to criticise the deal is former Deutsche Bank group treasurer Alex von Ungern-Sternberg, who says the deal is bad for shareholders and customers, and reckons a stock recovery would have been more likely if HBOS had remained independent.

He joins the ranks of an expanding collection of high-profile rebels, who are mainly based north of the border. These include Sir Donald MacKay, the chairman of the Scottish Mortgage Trust; Sir George Mathewson, a former RBS chief exec; Sir Peter Burt, former governor and chief executive of Bank of Scotland; Keith Skeoch, Standard Life’s chief executive; and David Alexander, owner of Edinburgh-based property firm DJ Alexander.

It’s an emotive issue north of the border, surrounding an institution that has been based here for nearly 300 years in some form or another. And while Lloyds TSB might be gently cooing in the ear of HBOS with promises of Scottish job retention, clearly there’s the worry that strategic decisions will suddenly be taken outside of Edinburgh.

There’s a growing “Save the Bank” group intent on throwing a spanner in the works of the deal, possibly by drawing together the cash of bankers and supporters, but it's more likely hoping for government intervention.

In spite of HBOS’s recent problems, it seems some people believe that it may, in fact, have an “exceptionally strong balance sheet”, as it claimed in March when rogue traders attempted to drive down the bank’s share price.

If the claims of these HBOS rebels are true, it seems the inevitable blood-letting on the horizon could have been avoided.