Watchdog seeks to limit ex-NIB chief’s future posts

THE High Court has been asked to bar former National Irish Bank (NIB) chief executive Jim Lacey from involvement in any company.

The application arises from the findings of the court-appointed inspectors’ report into the tax evasion scandal at the bank in the 1990s.

Yesterday, the Director of Corporate Enforcement told the court there was “a catastrophic failure of governance” during Mr Lacey’s tenure as chief of NIB and he must bear ultimate responsibility for “very serious wrongdoing” by the bank.

Mr Lacey failed to uphold or implement proper standards of corporate and banking behaviour while chief executive and demonstrated unfitness and a lack of commercial probity, the director claimed.

The July 2004 report of the inspectors into the affairs of NIB and National Irish Bank Financial Services not only justifies but mandates a court order disqualifying Mr Lacey from involvement in the management of any company on grounds of unfitness, argued Maurice Collins SC, for the director.

Mr Lacey, of Pine Haven, Grove House Gardens, Blackrock, Co Dublin, was in court for the opening of the hearing. In an affidavit resisting the disqualification order, Mr Lacey, who was chief of NIB between 1988 and 1994 and a director until 1997, rejects the findings of the inspectors in relation to him as “fundamentally flawed”.

Since leaving NIB, Mr Lacey said he has been heavily involved in various management and advisory positions in the state and private sector, nationally and internationally, and had discharged his duties in all cases “without even a hint of criticism”.

The hearing, before Mr Justice Roderick Murphy, is expected to last three weeks.