Anglo Tapes

This is all my own reading of the story so far, but the way I see it, the role of the regulator, the central bank, and the department of finance are key to the lack of progress here.

Anglo management were shockingly, outlandishly reckless and clearly held the authorities in nothing but contempt and ran rings around them, but those same authorities (save for a few head men) are still pulling the strings in the civil service, central bank, department of finance etc in public sector jobs for life. The government is powerless to act without the will & support of the civil service, that same civil service has a lot to lose from the truth coming out, and furthermore I'm sure neither FF nor FG would want any new revelations to emerge under an investigation about their administration's chronic failures to properly oversee the banks.

Seems to me that the politicians and civil servants at the helm have just as much if not more at stake reputation-ally than the bankers do should the truth come out. Anglo's reputation is already ruined, however these public service overseers jobs, reputation, and even liberty could be on the line next, depending on exactly how outmatched and asleep at the wheel they were. It would be an endless story of damaging revelations about incompetent public officials being led up the garden path for years by greedy but much smarter bankers.

Would that be why we now see recordings which presumably have been in the hands of an under-resourced Garda investigation for four years or so being made public by a journalist with long-proven links to sources within the Gardai? Is this the result of police frustration with the pace or resources being given to the investigation? A result of allowing the momentum of the enquiries to collapse? An unwillingness to allow major crime to go unpunished to protect criminally negligent public officials?

Presumably it was not a government source who was responsible for leaking the tapes. They do nothing for the credibility of several of our most recent governments, who were backed all the while by the same civil service middle and upper management we still have in place. Presumably Drumm and co. could tell a few stories in the witness box about department of finance decisions which would make the general public's hair stand on end.

We have been let down as much here by our public service and our officials as we have been taken advantage of by a small but powerful elite group of bankers. When there's a smell of a cover-up, it's often good to start with whoever it is that has the most to lose and work down from there.

Scofflaw wrote: »

There's been a Garda investigation since 2009, but it's a fraud investigation against a bank with a balance sheet the size of a country, so four years is hardly bizarre.

And if we come out of it with no further prosecutions, that may not be anything political, I'm afraid. There may just be a lack of charges that will stick.

cordially,
Scofflaw

It's all very well announcing an investigation to get headlines and seem like you're taking swift action to handle a problem, but realistically that can be used as a way of burying a story you don't want to give any air to depending on how you allow the investigation to run. There are probably hundreds of thousands of hours of recorded conversations in question here, maybe millions of files and years worth of transactions requiring very specialist knowledge. Its sn unprecedented logistical exercise in tge hostory of our state. How many officers have been assigned to this "investigation", what is their level of expertise in financial matters? What external supports and access to advice or support have they got?

The bank guarantee and its abuse by our banks has been an absolutely unprecedented event in the history of our nation, with catastrophic consequences for the country. It shouldn't be enough to just announce an investigation. This should be the largest, most single-minded and well resourced tooth-combing of evidence the country has ever seen, and anything less than that stinks of a whitewash and of collusion between corrupt, complicit people in positions of power to conceal or delay damaging revelations for them. This is contrary to the justice which the Irish people (who are footing the bill for all this) deserve, regardless of how many political or financial careers are wrecked in the process.

I'll say it again: Governments have been toppled and presidents impeached over less than this elsewhere. Our country is ruined as a result of this systemic corruption, and its an absolute joke to me that this investigation has taken five years to get absokutely nowhere, to the point where we have to have an Irish solution to an Irish problem and leak these tapes so that the public goes bananas and demands action.

I know that the structure of the tribunals was different, but think about the evidence book in those cases. Brown envelope payments and questionable offshore accounts of a handful of public officials, amounting to a few scores of millions at most, and it took ten years or more to follow the paper trail there and get to a conclusion. We are looking at a case involving hundreds of billions of euros, and a colossal fraud propagated by some of the most well connected and financially sharp players in institutions at the top of their game all over the world. I firmly believe that this has not only the possibility of toppling our government if it is fully and if it is fully and properly investigated (rather than by means of some bumbling toothless political enquiry with narrow terms of reference), what it would reveal about the systemic failures in our democracy has the potential to force us to re-evaluate our entire state and means of government, and could even lead to renewal of our constitution as has happened in France many times, or more recently in Iceland.

This is what's at stake here for our political class. Without engaging in hyperbole, this has the potential to end politics as we have known it in ireland for nearly 100 years.

Scofflaw wrote: »

What there is in the way of skeletons isn't, I think, in Anglo's cupboards, but in the cupboards of the Department of Finance. Sure, we've had reports that describe our regulatory ineptness, but they were couched in general terms of prevailing culture, regulatory capture, process issues, groupthink problems and so on. If it becomes personal, courtesy of the tapes, then some civil servants will find themselves personally in the spotlight. In general, I'm opposed to that kind of personalisation of systemic issues, but given that there's been no apparent reaction to the systemic reports, maybe it's time to move on to the personal...

Well said, and far more succinctly put than my attempt at making the same point was. This is the real reason we are not seeing any movement here. On a personal level, our civil service (the life blood of our government) has got far too much to lose by facilitating the details of what went on being made public.