Inquiry yet to get under banks’ skin as Cowen faces inordinate grilling

The Oireachtas Banking Inquiry resumes today with Bank of Ireland chief executive Richie Boucher appearing in the morning followed after lunch by Cormac McCarthy, the former chief executive of Ulster Bank, who is now the finance director of Irish bookmaker Paddy Power.

Lest you’ve forgotten, Boucher is the only senior bank executive to have survived the clean-out of directors by Government at domestic banks following the financial crash in late 2008.

Unless you count Fergus Murphy, who was in charge of EBS Building Society at the time of its nationalisation in 2010 and merger with AIB. Murphy has since slipped into the shadows at Bankcentre, where he is director of products but not a member of the group board.

Boucher even earned a promotion after the crash, becoming chief executive at Bank of Ireland in February 2009. And he is the only bank executive not restricted by the Government €500,000 pay cap, although he has volunteered reductions in his remuneration in recent years.

Boucher wasn't in Government Buildings on the night of the guarantee (September 29th, 2008) but he was part of Bank of Ireland's war cabinet back at base – one of those charged with cobbling together €5 billion to meet a Government request to provide emergency liquidity to Anglo Irish Bank.

He was also in charge of the Irish business before the whole house of cards came crashing down. The committee will no doubt seek to tease out his role in the expansion of Bank of Ireland’s exposure to property and land development, and its relationship with large borrowers.

Ulster Bank was last week charged by former Bank of Ireland boss Brian Goggin as being the "pioneer" of 100 per cent mortgages. It also backed some of the big-ticket development deals, including the purchase of Jurys Inn for €1.166 billion, Seán Dunne's purchase of the Ballsbridge sites for €375 million, and Arnotts' plan to develop a Northern Quarter in Dublin.

Pumping up

Ulster Bank wasn’t bailed out by Irish taxpayers –

Royal Bank of Scotland

pumped £15 billion (€20.3m) into saving the business – but it did play a role in pumping up the market. McCarthy will no doubt defend his record in all of this.

Last week, Eugene Sheehy, former chief executive of AIB, and Goggin provided conflicting accounts of events in Government Buildings on the night of the guarantee. It might be left to Brian Cowen and senior civil servants at the department of finance to resolve this conflict.

Then there was the appearance of Jean-Claude Trichet, the former president of the European Central Bank, at an event hosted by the Institute of International and European Affairs at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham.

It was a contrived and somewhat farcical event. Trichet sat on a stage overlooking the committee members, hardly an ideal form of engagement. While his answers can be used as evidence, Trichet did not take an oath, unlike other witnesses.

He flatly rejected a claim by Socialist Party leader Joe Higgins that he had blackmailed the late Brian Lenihan about not burning bondholders. This appears to conflict with public comments made by Lenihan before his death in 2011.

Again, it could be left to others to corroborate one side or the other. John Hurley, Central Bank governor at the time of the crash, is due to appear on May 21st while Patrick Honohan, the current governor who was in charge at Dame Street at the time of our troika bailout, is also due to reappear before the committee.

The nexus phase is two weeks old and while the hearings have unearthed some interesting details about the night of the bank guarantee, they have failed, thus far,to get under the skin of the banks, and analyse the reasons for the explosion in lending on land development and property.

What possessed them to lend so much money to so few debtors for such risky developments? Whose bright idea was it to allow 100 per cent mortgages? Why didn’t they spot the bubble?

It also looks as if the inquiry will have to carry out its work in the absence of evidence from the main players at Anglo Irish Bank, Irish Nationwide and Irish Life & Permanent because of their involvement in various legal cases.

With just two more tranches of witnesses to be called over the next three weeks, the committee is running out of time if it plans to call any executives from the three institutions.

We know from last week’s hearings that the three were central to the events surrounding the crash in September 2008.

Two whole days

There’s also the question of why two whole days of hearings are being set aside for former taoiseach Brian Cowen when the bank executives only had to appear for half a day each. AIB’s Eugene Sheehy even shared his time with his predecessor

Michael Buckley

.

Evidence from the bankers last week indicated that Cowen was very much in charge on the night of the guarantee and clearly he was a central player, having served as both minister for finance and as taoiseach in the period up to crash.

But does this merit him being grilled for up to 20 hours when the executives who actually led the banks and almost bankrupted the State have only been required to spend about four hours each in the witness box?

Twitter: @CiaranHancock1