‘Robbing a bank is nothing compared to owning one’ - Ireland’s bankers exposed

By Rory Connolly

Poor people are jailed every day in Ireland for failing to pay minor debts, but it seems there is no law against bankrupting the entire nation.

If there was, some of the richest and most powerful people in Irish society - the bankers - would be on their way to Mountjoy. But instead of going to jail, these blood-sucking parasites still want to lord it over the rest of us.

While the government digs deeper into the pockets of ordinary workers to save the banks from the €30 billion worth of bad debt they generated for themselves, the bankers who created the crisis continue to wallow in their ill-gotten wealth.

We are told that the economy couldn’t function without them. Yet, for an institution apparently so vital to all our lives, banking in Ireland is entirely undemocratic.

A tiny clique of (mostly) men, wield enormous power. Just 20 executive directors run the country’s six banks and only two or three are public names.

They certainly know how to look after themselves. The top earner in recent years was David Drumm of Anglo Irish Bank who pocketed €4.65m in 2007. Bank of Ireland’s Brian Goggin wasn’t far behind with €4m.

But when he retires, poor Mr Goggin will have to get by on a miserable pension of just €656,000 a year. However will he manage?

At the recent extraordinary general meeting of AIB, where elderly shareholders threw eggs at the senior executives whose reckless greed has destroyed their pensions, the bank’s Chief Executive, Eugene Sheehy, smiled down on his attackers through a magnificent suntan that he didn’t get doing the garden.

During his four years at the helm of AIB, as he steered the bank to destruction, and with it the national economy, Sheehy pocketed over €5m in salary and bonuses, while millions more were poured into his personal pension plan. In 2007/2008 alone he was paid €3.25m.

He may have ruined the lives of countless old age pensioners, but he’ll retire himself in the lap of luxury with €530,000 annually.

Dermot Gleeson, Sheehy’s side-kick as AIB Chairman for the past six years, is a former Attorney General and a barrister who nettted a cool million of taxpayers’ money in fees when he acted for the crooked tax-dodging Goodman company at the Beef Tribunal in the 1990s.

He also chaired the Review Body on Higher Remuneration, notorious for awarding obscenely large salaries to senior bosses in the public sector. At AIB, Gleeson pockets nearly half a million a year in fees.

Meanwhile, over at Irish Nationwide, departing boss, Michael “Fingers” Fingleton, old pal of tax dodging thief Charles Haughey, had to return his most recent €1m bonus amidst uproar from members who were incensed at how Fingleton turned a mutual building society into a one-man operated bank that lent billions of Euro it didn’t have to Fingleton’s friends, the dodgy developers, who can’t repay their loans.

(But why should Fingers care when there are taxpayers to pick up the tab?)

In 2007, while Nationwide hurtled towards destruction, Fingers pocketed €2.3m, including a €1.4m bonus. And to cap it all, he has managed to keep his grossly overstuffed pension pot of €28m, €7m of which he can draw down as a tax free lump sum.

The astonishing greed of bankers was confirmed recently by Danny Kitchen.

Not to be confused with Kitchen Porter, Danny made the headlines when he declined Fingers Fingleton’s job after the salary was capped at just under €400,000 a year.

You would have to sympathise with Fingleton’s successor though, because it would be pretty hard to pay for the servants and six holidays a year on such lousy pay.

And Brian Lenihan thinks he deserves our praise for suggesting (ever so politely) that bankers might consider a salary cap of €500,000 a year.

But even the official Institutions Remuneration Oversight Committee has blown Lenihan away by proposing to up the cap to nearly €700,000. It’s hardly worth getting out of bed for!

Fingleton’s old mate, Sean FitzPatrick, ran Anglo Irish Bank into the gutter by lending like a lunatic to doomed developers.

But before the crash, Sean secretly borrowed nearly €90m for himself, a loan that Fingers helped him conceal.

For reasons we may never know, but assuredly nothing to do with the Fianna Fail Mafia, Lenihan and Cowen agreed to nationalise Anglo, lumbering the rest of us with the massive debts of its Fianna Fail supporting clients.

Now it seems FitzPatrick, although completely disgraced, is laughing all the way to the bank.

Experts have calculated that his pension pot will be at least €15m - but it’s more likely to be around €25m.

Seanie Fitz (as his old mate Bertie Ahern calls him) will be able to take €6m of this tax free, which is small compensation for not being able to appear in public for fear of a lynch mob.

Bankers, with their obscene salaries and gold plated pensions, were feted in the past for providing the life blood of the economy.

But while an economy might need credit to run smoothly, there is no logical reason for credit to be provided by private companies - which is what banks are - driven at all times by the need to maximise their own profits.

And maximise them they certainly did.

Between 2005 and 2007, the three big banks, AIB, BoI and Anglo, sucked up over €14.5 bn in profits. Now the rest of us are being asked to foot the bill for their insatiable greed.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

A “good” state bank, as opposed to the “bad” one the government is intent on lumbering us with, could assume the role of credit provider.

Existing banks could be nationalised in a way that brought the assets they hold as security for bad loans - land banks, housing estates, apartment blocks and office buildings - into full public ownership, for public use.

But that’s socialism, and Fianna Fail doesn’t do socialism. Ditto Fine Gael and Labour.

We have to do it ourselves.