REGULATION IS all about balance and achieving it requires both judgment and confidence. The events of the last year have seriously called into question the former – and greatly dented the latter – at the Financial Regulator.
The Government’s failure to address this problem and fix the regulator is now leading to a dangerous paralysis. We have gone, it seems, from a situation where the regulator was ineffective because it was not proactive enough, to one where its blind obedience to the rules is proving an obstacle in itself.
According to Alan Dukes, a Government nominee to the board of Anglo Irish Bank, the regulator’s excessive caution is now hampering attempts to come up with a business plan and appoint a chief executive to the nationalised bank. One obvious reason for the regulator’s ongoing failure to function correctly is the lack of a leader to implement much-needed reform. It is seven months since the departure of the chief executive of the Financial Regulator in the wake of multiple banking scandals and the position remains vacant.
The decision to leave such a vital role unfilled during the worst global financial crisis in living memory is baffling and should be a cause for public concern. Perhaps the reason that it isn’t the source of wider anger is that our capacity for being shocked by the regulator’s incompetence has been so blunted by the events of the last 12 months.
Yesterday was more of the same. At the publication of the regulator’s annual report the chairman of the authority – who remains in his position despite all that has gone on – told us several things we knew already. Firstly, that what happened in the banking industry should not have happened and secondly that the regulator failed to do its job.
But once again the issue of what really led to the regulator’s failure was side-stepped. There is still no coherent explanation for why the regulator did not act to rein in the banks or enforce its own rules in connection with issues such as directors loans at Anglo Irish Bank and the other controversies.Instead, as the Labour Party pointed out yesterday, the regulator is hiding behind obligations of client confidentiality.
The lack of any cogent analysis of what went wrong undermines the rationale for the new Commission on Banking which will take over the role of the Central Bank and the Financial Regulator and be chaired by the Governor of the Central Bank, as planned by the Government. It is hard to see how the public can be expected to have any faith in this structure, or any other solution, if the changes envisioned cannot be directly correlated to the failings of the previous system.
The same holds for the staff of the regulator who must make the new structure work. It may also go some of the way to explaining why the Government is having such difficulty in finding someone to take charge of the regulator. Full disclosure of what went wrong at the regulator remains a prerequisite for any successful reform.