New regulatory body aims to keep Republic's pro-business appeal

One of the main goals of the new Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ireland (FSRAI) was to "maintain Ireland as a good place to do business and to maintain the welcome mat for foreign investment, including financial services providers," the chairman of the FSRAI, Mr Brian Patterson, told the US-Ireland Business Summit in Washington yesterday.

"It has been a consistent part of government policy that Ireland is a good place to do business, for foreign, and in particular United States, companies," he said. "For that we absolutely must essentially maintain a good environment for corporate governance."

Mr Patterson, who is also chairman of the Irish Times Ltd and a director of Waterford Wedgwood, was speaking in a debate on the crisis of confidence in world markets following the financial and business scandals in the United States.

Using the business summit to put the new regulatory body in an international context, Mr Patterson told the gathering of chief executives and academics from the Republic, Northern Ireland and the US that regulations would be "light but effective and will lean towards principles rather than rules".

"We'll be tough when we need to be and we will adopt the mantra 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'," he said.

"Those of you who are doing financial services business in Dublin can be assured that we are not going to go in and upend the whole thing. Ireland is and will remain a good place for business for Irish and foreign firms."

Among the tasks of the FSRAI will be the integration of all financial services regulations into one aligned and consistent organisation, and significant strengthening of consumer protection, including the transparency of the market.

"The exuberance and hype of the last 10 years have diminished the need for honesty and decency in the leadership of both our corporations and our professions. The crisis we have now has stirred us into action on standards and enforcement.

"We need to rediscover the importance of values and apply at least as much energy to embed them in the cultures of our organisations," he said.

The crisis of confidence in corporate governance in the US was partly due to the excesses of executive compensation, he believed.

"In the US, the ratio of a chief executive's pay to the average non-supervisory worker, which in 1980 was 45 to one, in the year 2000 was 458 to one."

There was also widely held cynicism about reporting corporate governance, leading to a loss of confidence that affected both public and economic performance, and was an issue of major public concern.

The Republic had a lot of problems in the 1980s and 1990s but had been very active in getting its act together, he said.

This included passing into law in 2001 the Company Law Enforcement Act, which includes a director of Corporate Enforcement, Mr Paul Appleby "the living embodiment of 'speak softly but carry a big stick'."

In 2000, the Republic set up a Review Group on Auditing, which had put centrally the role of the audit committee in corporate governance, and also set up a Company Law Review Group to radically simplify company law.

Irish and British financial reporting standards were, he said, up to if not better in some ways than US accounting standards.

Mr Samuel DiPiazaza, global chief executive of PricewaterhouseCoopers, said his profession was groping through one of the most difficult periods in its history.

The entire reporting supply chain had broken down.

There was a great need for simplifying general accounting practices on a more principled base and making reports understandable.Less than 100 people in the US understood some of the current regulations in general accounting practices.