Shall we tell An Taoiseach?
Read more about: Economy 
Brian Lenihan has given a bewildering account of the knowledge within the government of the IL&P deposits in Anglo Irish Bank during September 2008. What’s being reported seems to indicate that (1) it was a cross-deposit relationship; Anglo put money with IL&P and IL&P put money with Anglo — it would be nice to see the accounting treatment of that; (2) His officials have known about the deposit since October, but he was only told more recently, didn’t reveal it at the time of nationalization, and apparently no one told Brian Cowen until very recently. There’s now a mirror image of the lucratively retired financial regulator Patrick Neary, whose officials likewise knew about the dodgy directors’ loans arrangements for much longer than he did.
Within the Irish government, what does get brought to the bosses’ attention? Sir Humphrey would be proud.
UPDATE: Here is the full record of the debate. Labour lost patience at the end.
Sir Humphrey would be proud.
Love it.
Brian Lenihan is not a mirror image of Patrick Neary. You may have misunderstood the outcome of the investigation into the Financial Regulator and Seanie Fitzpatrick’s loans.
It is clear that staff in the Financial Regulator’s office told the investigators that they had brought Seanie’s loans to Neary’s attention in Jan. 2008 but Neary flatly denied this. The wording of the report is subtle but clearly the investigators did not accept his denials.
The idea that a Minister would have to plough through a 700 page accountants report and be held responsible for not spotting an issue on page 128 is laughable (although politically it suits the Opposition to pretend that this was his responsibility).
In reality, it is the job of officials to brief their Minister and if they deliberately withheld crucial information, heads must roll. Brian Lucey of TCD made this point on VB tonight.
What a load of bollocks. Why was the loan not declared to the market. Where was the transparency that the law requires. Why was the small matter of funds being used to prop up the bank not immediately brought out into the open. Was this the same money that was being used to prop up the namks shares. Why have charges not been levied against the bank’s executives for breach of fiduciary responsibility. What did Ernst and Young know of all of this? What tricks was the bank pulling during the good times? Is Irish society systemically corrupt? Where will it end?
Will any journalist have the balls to dig a little bit deeper? Will Anglos’s loan book ever have a nice big torch shone on it. Will this bring down the government…because in any other European state, they would have been gone by now.