More than a touch of Hercule Poirot about bankers’ committee appearance

JUST when you thought our sleaze-splattered banking sector could hardly get much murkier, up pops a money mystery worthy of Hercule Poirot.

The AIB chiefs summoned before an Oireachtas committee yesterday did not exactly act like characters straight out of Agatha Christie’s Poirot novel, Dumb Witness, but self-appointed chief detective Senator Shane Ross clearly believed there was more to this than met the eye.

The plot pivots on a character, the outgoing AIB chief executive Eugene Sheehy would only refer to as “a Belgium national living in Switzerland”, whom the bank had mistaken for a member of the mega-wealthy Furstenberg brewing dynasty.