THE SECOND-highest ranking executive on the new management team at Anglo Irish Bank, who resigned in February after only a year in the job, launched a strong attack on the State authorities in a resignation letter to the bank, saying there was a lack of checks and balances within the country.
In a highly critical attack on the last government and the State authorities, Dutch banker Maarten Van Eden said although Anglo’s management had been overhauled, the financial system had not.
In the letter – the contents of which are disclosed today for the first time – Mr Van Eden criticised the Fianna Fáil–Green coalition government for making the wrong decision in winding down Anglo.
“From the start of this year, the authorities have continued to be unwilling to engage with the management of the bank in an open and transparent process,” he wrote in his December 2010 letter to Anglo’s chairman Alan Dukes and chief executive Mike Aynsley.
“I have shared with you my view that although the management of the bank has been overhauled, the system here has not.”
Mr Van Eden criticised the State authorities for their role in the events leading to the collapse of Anglo after the crisis struck in September 2008 and the scandals that have emerged since then.
“Apart from the recklessness, overconfidence and the total lack of professionalism, one sees clearly a lack of checks and balances not only within Anglo but within the country/ system as a whole,” he wrote in the letter that was read out in part to Anglo staff when he announced his resignation in February 2011.
“Parties were not dealing with one another at arm’s length, transactions were circular in nature, back to back and off market pricing. There was misrepresentation, market manipulation and market abuse.
“There was a green jersey agenda that, as so often is the case when nationalism is invoked, covered a multitude of sins. The rationale was made to fit the objective at the expense of guiding principles and truth.”
He argued that the government authorities were “stuck in their old ways” and did not “recognise nor understand conflicts of interest”.
The contents of the letter are contained in a new book, Anglo Republic: Inside The Bank That Broke Ireland, by Irish Times journalist Simon Carswell, which is published today by Penguin Ireland.
Mr Van Eden, who left the country following his departure from Anglo, has declined to comment on his criticisms.
The experienced banker, who worked at international banks HSBC, JP Morgan and Dutch group ING before joining Anglo in January 2010, said the new management at Anglo had “consistently been kept on the outside”.
“Management was good enough to clean out the stables and run the bank on a day-to-day basis, but was sent up the wrong hill as far as the future of the organisation was concerned,” said Mr Van Eden.
“Anglo had to be obliterated from the landscape,” he wrote, and the new management was “seen to be part of the old Anglo in spite of the radical changes implemented within the organisation”.
“There has been a complete lack of engagement from the authorities and decisions have come out of left field,” he wrote.