AIB scandal – Full force of the law must be applied
The activities of those very senior executives who were named this weekend as having been involved in offshore investment must be investigated by the gardaí.
The justice system cannot be more benign towards them than it was in the case of others who were found to have had illegal offshore accounts. In the case of senior bank officials who abused those laws, it has to be viewed with far more gravity.
It has been a demoralising week for the Irish banking sector, mainly through the series of scandals springing from the AIB and which have seeped into at least one semi-State company, Aer Lingus.
Its chief executive, Tom Mulcahy, resigned after pressure from Minister for Transport Seamus Brennan when he was identified as one of the five former AIB executives who were discovered to have had “tax issues”.
The attitude of current senior executives in AIB who still maintain they have nothing to resign over, can be starkly contrasted with that of Bank of Ireland chief executive Michael Soden.
His dramatic resignation was prompted by an investigation by the Sunday Business Post into an ‘adult’ website he accessed at the bank’s headquarters.
While he did nothing illegal, Mr Soden compromised standards which he himself set for the bank’s employees and made the decision to resign because he believed that “leaders of organisations should be measured by the highest standards”.
It is a credo which, quite obviously, is not one in vogue at AIB’s headquarters, despite the very damaging practices which were revealed last week and were only the latest in a series of accumulated scandals.
The chief executive of the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority, Liam O'Reilly, has said that new laws mean that inappropriate dealing could not happen today. However, it would be totally unacceptable should these alleged breaches of the tax laws at AIB, if proved, go unpunished.
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