Instead, we had a non-executive board member actually doing the work on checking the valuation of one of our deals.
It's absolutely right that the board should hold the CEO to account, not reinforce his stupidity or buttress his incompetence. A half-competent board would have told Masters he needed to step down after finding out he'd knowingly acted against legal advice to exclude shareholder loans from APR rules. Clearly the PL board (which is a weak one by the normal standards of corporate governance isn't half-competent.
You could apply the same criteria to the City board. Who's the domain expert on there? Who are the genuinely independent non-executives? Why isn't the CEO an executive director?