AIB hires top financial regulator

But for a few hanging chads in the Florida recount, Mr Eugene Ludwig might now be Treasury Secretary in a Gore administration. The 54-year-old banker is regarded as one of America's top financial regulators and with his pro-Democratic credentials had been widely tipped for a top job if Vice-President Al Gore had become President.

The man chosen by AIB to investigate and report on the loss of $750 million (€859.5 million) at Allfirst made his reputation as Comptroller of the Currency from 1993 to 1998, a post to which he was appointed by his friend, Bill Clinton, a former classmate at Yale Law School and fellow Rhodes scholar at Oxford. At a cabinet meeting after his appointment Mr Ludwig proposed to the President some radical reforms for what had been a little-known office attached to the US Treasury.

"Is this the right thing to do?" asked Clinton.

"Yes it is," replied Mr Ludwig, according to an account he gave later. He added: "The President just looked across the cabinet table and said, 'Then just go do it'. And I did."

What he did over the next five years was make the office one of the most powerful forces in the federal government.

As chief supervisor and regulator for the 3,000 national banks in the US, he presided over one of the most revolutionary periods in American banking history.

Mr Ludwig liberalised banking laws to stop the defection of corporate clients to other institutions with better access to bond and equity markets. Under his guidance banks were empowered to offer services in securities and insurance previously forbidden under a 1934 Act.

He pushed for risk-prediction models and tighter supervision of trading in volatile investments like derivatives - the instruments used by trader John Rusnak at Allfirst in his foreign currency dealings.

As Comptroller of the Currency he also eased a credit crunch which was stifling business, and revitalised a 1977 act requiring banks to invest in poorer neighbourhoods, which he regards as his proudest achievement. The insurance industry hated Ludwig's pro-bank reforms. "I was quite pilloried at the time by the interest groups as a wild man or something," he recalled.

The term of the York, Pennsylvania-born banker in the Clinton administration was not without political controversy. He got into hot water for taking part in a White House coffee morning organised by the Democratic National Committee in May 1996 to give top bankers access to the President.

Mr Ludwig acknowledged that he had made a "mistake" but ignored calls to resign. The Washington Post took him to task again in 1999 for helping raise money for Al Gore's presidential campaign. When his term as Comptroller of the Currency ended in 1998, Mr Ludwig declined an offer to serve a second spell, on the grounds that he might get stale and out of touch. He took the post of vice-president of Bankers' Trust and left soon afterwards to join Promontory Financial Group, a merchant bank specialising in financial service companies, of which he is now managing general partner.

Allfirst is not the first bank to call on Mr Ludwig for help. Last year the owners of Superior Bank of Chicago hired him to work out a rescue plan, after federal regulators closed it down at a cost of $500 million for insured deposits. In that celebrated case one of the issues involved a co-owner of the holding company taking a controversial $130 million loan from the bank. Mr Ludwig in now a leading advocate for improving worldwide regulatory standards. In January last year he said: "Unless we make serious progress towards updating, promulgating and enforcing international standards for the global economy, I must predict another serious international financial services debacle within the next decade."

Though maybe not quite on the scale he was thinking of, Allfirst has proved him right.