So times have moved on and Fintan O'Toole of Irishtimes tells us that Peter Sutherland played a key role in making Allied Irish Bank "the toxic mess it is." Here is an excerpt:
Fine Gael Banking strategy in meltdown
by Fintan O'Toole - Irishtimes
The party about to go into government is unable to take a coherent position on the biggest problem facing the country, writes FINTAN O'TOOLEIF YOU’RE of a certain age, you’ll remember the story of the heroic Dutch boy who put his finger in the dyke to prevent the land from being flooded. If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to be that boy, look in the mirror. There is a tide rising against the euro and the European banking system. Our brilliant Government volunteered us to stick our finger in the dyke.
Our masters have now gone off to high ground and are shouting at us through a loudhailer to keep that finger in the hole. We’re tired and cold and starving and we don’t want to do it any more. So how do we get this message across? There’s only one way – threaten to pull our finger out of the dyke. Nothing else will get more than a few cosmetic concessions.
Fine Gael is now on course to form a single-party government. Voters need to know whether the party is at all serious about facing up to the immorality and impossibility of the official approach since September 2008. (The money still at stake is €75 billion of debt securities held by Irish banks, including €7.3 billion in subordinated bonds and €17 billion in senior unsecured bonds.)
Leaving aside the rhetorical posturing and the photo opportunities, is there the slightest chance that Fine Gael in government will get the finger out? The evidence so far is that Fine Gael is bluffing.
Before looking at that evidence, it is worth remembering the background to the party’s approach to the banks. Much attention is rightly paid to the role in the crisis of Fianna Fáil’s hinterland – its social, intellectual and cultural closeness to the likes of Seán FitzPatrick.
But Fine Gael’s banking hinterland is every bit as murky. Two of the party’s most prominent intellectuals (both former Fine Gael attorneys general), Peter Sutherland and Dermot Gleeson, played key roles in making Allied Irish Bank the toxic mess that it is. Sutherland, as chairman, responded pitifully to the Dirt tax evasion crisis – a crisis that should have marked a watershed in the culture of Irish banking. And Gleeson, also as chairman, oversaw AIB’s disastrous attempts to out-Anglo Anglo.
Read the entire article here
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Thank you to an Anonymous comment for this information link.
Audio interesting...
Bottom line...with buckets of this kind of shit on Goldman's Board, is it any surprise that Fabrice didn't know better?
"Dear Lord Blankfein, in the name of Martha Stewart and Bishop Ivan of Boesky, please spare us the self adulatory bull shit about how the Men of G are some kind of genetically superior pedigree of low life Wall Street scum bag!"
Martha, if you ever read this, here's to you!
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/come-and-see-goldman-insider-trading-circus
ANOTHER "GOLDEN" MOMENT:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-01/ex-goldman-sachs-director-rajat-gupta-tipped-off-raj-rajaratnam-sec-says.html
Wonder why you don't ever see this guy on financial media?...
Four time bombs that will blow up Wall Street
Commentary: Too late to jail bank CEOs; only revolution will succeed
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Put Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein in jail for six months, and all this will stop, all over Wall Street and America, a former congressional aide tells Matt Taibbi in his latest Rolling Stone attack, “Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? Financial crooks brought down the world’s economy — but the feds are doing are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them.”
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/four-time-bombs-that-will-blow-up-wall-street-2011-03-01
A Straightforward Criminal Case Against Wall Street CEOs and Senior Executives
Contrary to prevailing propaganda, there is a fairly straightforward case that could be launched against the CEOs and CFOs of pretty much every US bank with major trading operations. I’ll call them “dealer banks” or “Wall Street firms” to distinguish them from very big but largely traditional commercial banks like US Bank.
Since Sarbanes Oxley became law in 2002, Sections 302, 404, and 906 of that act have required these executives to establish and maintain adequate systems of internal control within their companies. In addition, they must regularly test such controls to see that they are adequate and report their findings to shareholders (through SEC reports on Form 10-Q and 10-K) and their independent accountants. “Knowingly” making false section 906 certifications is subject to fines of up to $1 million and imprisonment of up to ten years; “willful” violators face fines of up to $5 million and jail time of up to 20 years.
Moreover, anyone with an operating brain cell knows “market prices” were being gamed by dealer banks passing small trades between them or with friendly clients, typically hedge funds who might also like to show high valuations, to establish flattering marks. If the marks Citi was relying on were the result of collusion, and the bank was either involved in or aware of the collusion, this undermines the OCC view of the validity of the marks at Citi and other banks. If yours truly knew of this practice, it had to be widespread and well known at the firms themselves.
Will any of this happen? Of course not. The decision was made at the time of the TARP, and reaffirmed early in the Obama administration when there was serious talk of resolving Citigroup and Bank of America, that no one at the helm of the senior banks would be subject to serious scrutiny, much the less actually expected to be held accountable for actions that wrecked the economy and have imposed serious costs on ordinary Americans. The case we described above is relatively simple to explain to a jury and has the advantage of being the sort where the plaintiffs could build on their experience in one action in subsequent cases.
But that sort of truth, that most, probably all, of the major Wall Street banks were engaged in the same sort of misconduct and the violations extended to the very top of the firms, would expose numerous other parties as complicit. So we’ll permit the cancer in our society to metastasize rather than threaten the power structure. But at least we citizens can make it clear, even if we cannot change the outcome, that we are not buying the canard that nothing can be done to fight this disease.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/03/a-straightforward-criminal-case-against-wall-street-ceos-and-senior-executives.html
Too late to jail bank CEOs?
http://tinyurl.com/4vcyvv6
The Perfidy of Government: Evidence v. Denial
By paul craig roberts
Enter Goldman Sachs as a buyer of swaps from Cassano and a borrower of stocks from Neuger. Once the real estate bubble that the crazed Federal Reserve had caused popped, all the fraud that had been disguised by rising real estate prices appeared in its naked glory. AIG couldn't cover Cassano's swaps, and it could not return the collateral to short-sellers that Neuger had invested, unknowingly, in toxic waste.
This was the origin of the TARP bailout, which was perceived by Goldman Sachs (whose former executives, as Taibbi relates, controlled the U.S. Treasury, financial regulatory agencies, and the Federal Reserve) as an opportunity not merely to have U.S. taxpayers make good on its exploitation of AIG, but also to fund with free capital supplied by hapless taxpayers more money-making opportunities for "banks too big to fail."
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Perfidy-of-Government-by-paul-craig-roberts-110228-405.html
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