Central Bank silent on probes

The Central Bank said it won’t say whether it will use special powers to investigate any of Ireland’s main banks that survived the crash only with the help of bailouts.

It comes after the Central Bank said yesterday it had settled a case with one of Ireland’s most notorious dead banks — Irish Nationwide — imposing a fine of €5m, which it cannot collect and has therefore waived, on the former building society for “multiple breaches of financial services law and regulation, including persistent failure to comply with its own internal policies and procedures”.

The Central Bank, which only revealed the scale of the probe last week — the first it has brought under a 1942 Act — said yesterday that a parallel probe into a number of unnamed former directors was still ongoing. Irish Nationwide, along with Anglo Irish, was folded into Irish Bank Resolution Corp, which is now in liquidation.