Profile: Michael Walsh, former Irish Nationwide chairman

Michael Walsh, a former professor of banking at UCD and a long time associate of the businessman Dermot Desmond, joined the board of the Irish Nationwide Building Society in 2001 and served as its chairman.

Dr Walsh (63) resigned suddenly from his position with INBS in February 2009 just as the true extent of the crisis in the Irish financial services system was becoming evident.

The resignation came a day after INBS saw its debt rating downgraded by Moody’s to within one level of junk status and two months after the society found itself at the centre of controversy linked to the treatment of loans belonging to the former chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, Sean FitzPatrick.

Dr Walsh has been a director of Daon, part of Mr Desmond’s IFSC-based International Investment and Underwriting (IIU) group, since 2000.

Daon is a biometric enabling technology company, according to the IIU website. Dr Walsh was a director of IIU from 1994 to 2011.

Earlier this year, the liquidators of the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, into which Anglo and the INBS were subsumed, said they had settled an action taken against Dr Walsh and three other former directors of the society.

The settlement came after mediation and brought to an end a case that centered on the board’s resolution to delegate its powers to the society’s chief executive, Michael Fingleton.

A case being taken against Mr Fingleton was not settled.