Anglo tapes prove we need proper inquiry into banking fiasco

We have all long suspected that bankers, whose incompetence and avarice cost us our national sovereignty, have been laughing at us.
The Anglo tapes — replete with chuckles, chortles, cackles and guffaws — confirm that suspicion in spades. The recordings, of phone calls between Anglo execs in late 2008, have done more to underscore the causes of our current penury than any article, speech, report or half-baked inquiry in the past five years.
The Government, the Central Bank and the financial regulator were duped. It didn’t take much.
A small cabal of bankers trouped into the regulator’s office late at night, gave the civil servants a scare at bedtime and walked back out with a €440bn guarantee under their belts. The Anglo lads could barely contain their glee. And who could blame them? Having chanced their arms by asking for €7bn, after plucking that figure out of their arses, the State instead wrote a blank cheque and signed it with the names of every single citizen in the country before gifting it to the entire rotten banking sector.
They couldn’t believe their luck in Anglo. They were rolling in the aisles, mercilessly lampooning the gormless civil servants who took them at their word and unquestioningly handed over the dosh.
In the first tape, released by the Irish Independent, chuckle brothers in chief, John Bowe, head of capital markets, and Peter Fitzgerald, director of retail banking, are in rare form. The bank, at the time, was haemorrhaging €1.5bn a day and was hurtling towards oblivion. Lesser mortals would have sounded a bit panicked. Or, at least, a tad concerned.
Not these masters of the universe. They were in their element, easily running rings around any piddling obstacles that were put in their way. They wanted a bailout and they knew how to get it. The regulator was viewed as a joke, a soft touch, an irrelevance. Politicians were spun a line, the cheapest bailout in history, and happily swallowed it hook, line and sinker.
With the fate of the bank hanging in the balance, the suits in Anglo were supremely confident it would be rescued. Defeat was never an option.
“The strategy here is you pull them in, you get them to write a big cheque and they have to keep — they have to support their money. If they saw the enormity of it up front they might decide, they might decide they have a choice. You know what I mean? They might say the cost to the taxpayer is too high. But . . . if it doesn’t look too big at the outset . . . if it looks big, big enough to be important but not too big that it kind of spoils everything,” mused Bowe, who knew damn well the €7bn figure wasn’t enough. The State took the bait. Sounding almost hysterical after the guarantee was introduced, a delirious Bowe toasted all of the German money that was about to come swilling, briefly, into the bank by giving a rousing rendition of the German national anthem.
One can only imagine what the reaction in the Bundestag will be to his ill-advised little ditty. “We have to get the money in … get the f**king money in, get it in,” cackled David Drumm in response, sounding more like Del Boy Trotter than the CEO of a national bank.
If this was the tenor of conversations at work, can you imagine what it was like in the pub? And boy did they get the f**king money in. So much f**king money. €34bn, in total, which continued to be shovelled into the putrefying corpse of the zombie bank long after they had left their gilded positions and exited, leaving the rest of us to pick up the tab.
And that was only the half of it. A similar sum was ultimately divided among the other banks. More may yet be required. Nobody knows where it will end. None of this is new. We knew, or at least suspected, all of this already. But what we had yet to hear was the contemptuous disregard, breathtaking arrogance and brazen fecklessness of bankers who talked about conning the state out of billions as blithely as if they were discussing a €100 loan.
They just didn’t care, about any of it. They didn’t give a toss about how much the bailout would ultimately cost. They knew that they wouldn’t be paying and had absolutely no qualms about what they were doing and the price that the country could ultimately be forced to pay.
Following the revelations, there have been howls of protest from politicians.
The most galling reaction came from Fianna Fáil finance spokesman Michael McGrath. Clearly a master of understatement, he said there appeared to be “some evidence of a strategy to dupe the taxpayer into footing the bill” at Anglo.
No Michael. The strategy was to dupe your Government and it was an unqualified success, after the Fianna Fáil and Green Party coalition proved as useful as a parachute in a submarine when it came to reining in the banks. Not only did our politicians and the regulator fail us then, they have continued to fail us in the intervening years, preferring to draw a line under the raiding of the State’s coffers instead of instituting anything as potentially embarrassing as an inquiry into what happened.
One suspects that there are so many skeletons in closets, that no one is quite sure what will come tumbling out if the door is eventually opened, even ajar.
But someone has to be to blame. There has to be some accountability. Instead, what we have seen is all of the main players slinking off the field after being rewarded with gilt-edged pensions that will see them living in luxury for the rest of their days.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are left to pick up the pieces as the Government targets the elderly, the unemployed and special needs children to fill the gaping hole in its books.
Five years after Anglo stuck its hand out and demanded a bailout, it is an indictment of this Government, and the last, that the only revelations about that period have come from journalists.
It is also instructive that a crime journalist, Paul Williams, and not a business or finance reporter, has broken the biggest financial story of the year. Instead of more empty words and promises, this Government could endeavour to adequately resource the agencies that investigate white-collar crime, all of which have had their budgets slashed since 2008.
It could also bite the bullet and abandon plans for a toothless Oireachtas inquiry, which would just be used as a self-promotion tool by glory-hunting politicians, and institute a credible, independent and cost-effective tribunal in its place.
The people want answers. It’s about time we got them.