Central Bank fines firms €27m but policing criticised

The Central Bank has doled out €27.17m worth of fines to 54 financial institutions over the past four-and-a-half years.

Of those, eight fines of over €1m were administered, with the largest sanction of €3.5m imposed on Ulster Bank in November 2014 following a major IT failure two years previously.

The failure left hundreds of thousands of customers without basic banking facilities for a 28-day period covering June and July 2012 and resulted in the largest fine ever administered by the Central Bank.