IN the year that contained the fifth anniversary of the global financial crisis, it might be reasonable to assume that all the stones had been uncovered, and all the nasties revealed.

However, as a year of public outrage, 2013 marked a new nadir for the reputation of British business. Neither the long slump nor the onset of recovery seem to have transformed business behaviour. As politicians win cheap popularity by exploiting public outrage, a truly healthy relationship between business and society looks further away than ever.

Banking scandals appear to be proliferating even as the era of ex-knights Fred Goodwin and James Crosby fades into history. No wonder the Scottish Government's November White Paper mentioned only "insurance and investment management" when talking up the competitive strengths of Scotland's financial services.

Although HBOS parent Lloyds Banking Group remained on the rack for PPI mis-selling, for them 2013 saw a return to what now counts for stability. For RBS, on the other hand, this was a year to forget. Chief executive Stephen Hester left in June amid claims he had been sacked by the Chancellor (for reasons never fully explained) to be replaced by no-nonsense New Zealander Ross McEwan. The imposing former retail banking head made all the right noises about a "new focus on customers", but struggled to make these messages heard above the clattering of skeletons in the corporate cupboard.

As a Sunday Herald investigation revealed, the bank is burdened with around 16 largely unexploded "timebombs": historic and not-so historic "conduct" issues carrying future cumulative liabilities in the hundreds of billions. Not that 2013 lacked action for Scotland's financial flagship, as crisis after crisis pushed the bank's promised return to the private sector further into the post-election long grass.

A selection of RBS's toxic troubles would have to include a £391 million Libor-rigging fine, followed by outrage over a £800,000 bonus for Hester a few weeks later. There was also a $5 million (£3.2m) penalty to US arm Citizens Bank to "resolve issues with its overdraft and rebate programmes", the cutting of a further 1400 jobs, including nearly 600 in Scotland, and the threat to close 10% of its branch network.

The bank came under a European investigation (along with 12 other banks) over "collusion to use anti-competitive practices", and received a heavy fine for its part in rigging the Euribor exchange rate. RBS was simultaneously fending off the opening stages of a multi-faceted action by shareholders (including giants such as Legal & General), alleging that they were misled prior to the 2008 rights issue, not to mention a $100m fine from US authorities for sanctions-busting.

Most damaging of all, perhaps, were the further allegations, exquisitely timed to follow McEwan's protestations of a new customer focus.

These were allegations of a systematic post-Fred era campaign by the bank to build itself up at the expense of the very companies it was supposed to be helping. These very serious claims have led to an investigation by the Financial Conduct Authority, which is following up a report by Business Secretary Vince Cable's entrepreneur adviser, Lawrence Tomlinson.

His claims are that RBS drove firms to collapse in order to buy back their assets at rock-bottom prices, feeding them to the bank's Global Restructuring Group (GRG), which is alleged to have changed the terms of loan deals, imposed inflated interest rates and charge hefty penalties. Given the punishment of the balance sheet caused by these sins and alleged sins, it was no great surprise when group finance director Nathan Bostock defected to Santander after less than a year in the job.

While trouble at RBS was no great surprise, the same could not be said for the disgrace of the relatively cuddly Co-operative Bank, which seemed to confirm widespread public fears that everything ever considered good about British banking now bears the taint of the gutter.

Not only was the self-consciously virtuous Co-op forced to cede control of its banking business to US hedge funds after the scale of its capital shortfall became public, it was hit by the arrest of former chairman Paul Flowers, a one-time local Labour politician and Methodist preacher with no banking qualifications and a technicoloured private life, who held the chairmanship during a period when the bank nearly collapsed.

Elsewhere on the high street and in its cyber equivalent, a rebellion was brewing, as global firms such as Starbucks, Vodafone, Google and Amazon came under heavy fire for avoiding paying taxes on their UK sales, and people power of sorts, in the form of a growing culture of naming and shaming, as well as (to a small extent) boycotting, began to gain purchase.

It was much trumpeted that Starbucks had sales of £400m in the UK last year but paid no corporation tax, instead transferring money to a Dutch sister company in royalty payments. It also bought coffee beans from Switzerland and paid high interest rates to borrow from other parts of the business.

Amazon - also in the frame for its frequent recourse to so-called "zero-hours" contracts - only reported a "tax expense" of £1.8m, while ­Google's UK unit paid just £6m to the Treasury in 2011 on a £395m turnover.

Public anger was channelled, as it was quite often last year, through Westminster's Parliament's Public Accounts Committee, whose redoubtable chairman Margaret Hodge posed the witheringly apposite and sarcastic question of why Starbucks even continued to do business in the UK, if it was making such frequent losses? Um …

The titles of business public enemies of the year, however, surely go to the heads of the "Big Six" energy companies, whose above-inflation price rises at a time of increasingly constrained household spending caused a storm whose political side-effects are by no means played out.

The companies - British Gas, SSE, ScottishPower, Npower, E.On, and EDF - tried in vain to convince the public that their price rises merely reflected the fluctuations of the wholesale market and the need to earn profits to invest in infrastructure, but that cut little ice with an angry public, whipped into a state of fury by Ed Miliband, who scored the tactical political hit of the year by pledging in September to freeze prices until 2017.

Apart from pointing out that the Big Six, not to mention toothless Ofgem, were Labour creations, all that the Coalition could offer in response was an attempt to strip green obligations from consumer prices. Whether or not the attack on the companies was wholly fair, or the proposed solutions are workable, there was no doubt that this showdown marked a rare - and welcome - display of consumer muscle.

In 2013, big business was forced to acknowledge recession-battered consumers are mad as hell, and will never again accept business as usual. Few will bet that sweetness and light will return in 2014.