This business is dead."Barings staff blame the volte-face on politicking by Michel Tilmant, the ING board member for commercial and investment banking and Mr Robins' boss.Mr Robins, who joined from UBS last year, thought he had the full backing of the ING board in his plans to rebuild the tattered Barings franchise. He had hoped that Mr Kist would come to London to explain the decision in person No chance. "He has decided to bury his head in the sand," complained another close colleague. In this colleague's view, the Dutch had never really understood the business they picked up for a symbolic £1 after it had been bankrupted when Nick Leeson, the rogue trader who racked up £860m of derivatives losses in 1995.Those associated with the old Barings are long gone But Mr Robins was just getting into his stride. In July, he had shelled out £127m to buy Charterhouse, the UK securities house and was just the other week touted as a potential buyer of Bear Stearns, one of the last US securities firms still on the shelf.When Mr Robins poached the old Jardine Fleming's Japanese corporate finance team this summer, things seemed at last to be starting to move. To cope with the three-year expansion, ING was taking over the old Fleming's offices next door in Copthall Avenue.With hindsight it looks like Mr Robins was probably fooling himself Amsterdam may have said it was right behind him. But many suspect that ING's heart was more into insurance and asset management than investment banking.

Since the failure of attempts to buy Crédit Commercial de France, the French bank which went to HSBC in April, and the arrival of 56-year-old Mr Kist at the helm in May, ING has tripled its US insurance business, buying ReliaStar and the international units of Aetna, an American insurance group.Strategically, Mr Kist's inclinations are probably correct. With stronger firms like Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette throwing in the towel, it is hard to see what ING Barings could have achieved in investment banking. Analysts at Merrill Lynch put out a buy note on the strength of the decision to pull out. But Mr Robins' close colleagues disagree: "He was taking the business places," one colleague said "That is what is so sad.

If ING had the appetite they could have done something with the business or at least had something they could sell."Torn between loyalty to his employers and colleagues such as Malcolm Le May, head of equities, whom he persuaded to join his attempt to resurrect the firm, Mr Robins refused to talk to the press But his memo said it all. "ING Barings has once again become an organisation of which we can feel proud .... We realise this change of direction is unexpected and we are all saddened by it," he said.Yesterday, he was seeking to persuade Amsterdam to honour promises to individuals about pay and bonuses. But even that is not guaranteed.When Aad Jacobs, the then ING chairman, bought Barings five years ago he bought the story that, but for Mr Leeson, there was nothing wrong with Barings that could not be fixed. In fact, the old guard at Barings were already struggling to integrate three disparate businesses: The old Barings UK corporate advisory business; the emerging markets securities business, Baring Securities, rudderless since its founder, Christopher Heath, had quit; and lastly Barings Asset Management, the only bit of the firm that will survive this latest cull.One of the first acts by Hessel Lindenbergh, Mr Jacobs' lieutenant, was to dismiss most of the senior management who were tainted by the Barings affair Many of them were never to work in the City again. But the rot really set in in 1997 when Mr Lindenbergh, who is fondly remembered by those who worked with him, gave way to Marinus Minderhoud, a company man, with an IT background, and, as it soon transpired, insufficient grasp of the business. His unsuccessful attempts to merge Barings with ING's other European operations sparked a string of departures including those of James Lupton and Simon Borrows, then Barings star UK corporate financiers.

The business never really recovered.When Mr Minderhoud carried the can for the Russian bond market losses in 1998, and was replaced by David Robins, a Brit, few staff were disappointed. But it was like so often in the story of Barings under ING management; yet another false dawn.This is not so much the final chapter of the Barings affair but a postscript to a story that ended more than three years ago - how ING finished off the job Nick Leeson never quite managed and killed off Britain's oldest merchant bank.. It's not unusual for a former editor to fire the odd caustic remark at a past employer. But last week, James Brown, the creator and former editor of Loaded, reached for his machine-gun. He launched an unprecedented attack on the "ladmags" sector that he revolutionised. He declared that it had become "stale", "pathetic" and "embarrassing", and even suggested that some men's magazines - including a recent edition of GQ, another of his former magazines - were in danger of pandering to paedophiles. It's not unusual for a former editor to fire the odd caustic remark at a past employer.