ONE OF the reports into the causes of the banking crisis is expected to refer to the €7 billion deposits between Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Life & Permanent (IL&P) in 2008 as window dressing beyond acceptable norms.
The report by international banking experts Klaus Regling and Max Watson is expected to refer to the controversial deposits but only in passing as the focus is on events leading up to the crisis.
The former IMF officials have assessed the broad contributory factors causing the crisis, while Central Bank governor Patrick Honohan has assessed the role played by the Financial Regulator and the Central Bank in his report.
Dr Honohan is expected to support the Government’s decision to introduce the guarantee and say that other governments were forced to revisit bank rescue plans as the financial crisis deteriorated.
Dr Honohan is expected to appear before the Oireachtas finance committee next week to discuss the findings of his report.
Meanwhile, the Financial Regulator declined to comment on criticism by former Irish Life Permanent (ILP) chief executive Denis Casey on why it did not intervene to scrutinise or influence how Anglo reported the €7 billion deposits with IL&P when the bank published results for the period covering the transactions weeks after they had occurred.
A spokeswoman for the regulator said the transactions were being investigated by the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation and the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE).
The Irish Timesreported yesterday that Mr Casey, who resigned as IL&P chief executive in February 2008 when the deposits became public, submitted a sworn statement to the Garda, the ODCE and the regulator last week as he has not yet been interviewed during the 17-month-old investigation into the deposits.
An ODCE spokesman declined to comment on why he had not yet been interviewed by investigators.
Mr Casey said in his statement that the Department of Finance, the regulator and Central Bank were aware of the September 2008 deposits before Anglo published results in December 2008.
He claims that the authorities made “no effective intervention” to scrutinise or influence how Anglo reported the deposits.
The department said this was a matter for the regulator and it had raised the deposits as an issue with the regulator in October 2008 after they were contained in a PricewaterhouseCoopers report.
Kevin Cardiff, secretary general of the department, told the Committee of Public Accounts last month that he received a call from the National Treasury Management Agency which asked if he had seen “the figure of €7 billion as it looked a little strange”. Mr Cardiff asked the regulator within days if it had seen the figure.
The regulator and the department said they did not approve the transactions and would not have approved them as they encouraged inter-bank lending, not the type of back-to-back transactions between Anglo and IL&P.
