Call for CAB involvement in inquiry into rogue bankers

BANKING COLLAPSE:LABOUR PARTY justice spokesman Pat Rabbitte has called for the involvement of the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) in the investigation of rogue bankers.

He said legislation should be changed if necessary to allow the bureau to seize assets “pending the outcome of the very tardy legal process”.

He said the banking collapse and the billions of euro necessary for a functioning banking system “is the single biggest factor stoking the anger that is so evident among citizens who are paying the prices for the bankers’ dereliction of duty”.

People could not understand “why nobody has gone to jail for destroying our economy and undermining our society”, or why “[bankers’] substantial assets and properties cannot be sequestered pending the outcome of the very tardy legal process”.

“I can see no reason why the Criminal Assets Bureau should not examine that possibility, with an amendment to the law if necessary,” he said.

At the party’s annual conference, delegates backed a proposal for a salary cap of €250,000 for employees of banks covered by the bank guarantee, and they supported the introduction of a 0.05 per cent financial tax on all currency transactions to discourage speculators.

During a debate at the party’s annual conference on the banking crisis, Cork North-Central TD Kathleen Lynch told delegates that “whether there is a banking inquiry now or under Labour in government, we are going to have it”, and it would establish “who was complicit”.

Highlighting the cost to society of the banking collapse, she spoke of a young child, Jack, who could not communicate and whose special needs assistant learnt sign language and adapted it for him.

“The special needs assistant is gone”, she said, and “no other person can communicate with Jack”. “That’s the effect of Mr FitzPatrick’s treason.”

Labour finance spokeswoman Joan Burton said the “100,000 or more people who will emigrate from Ireland this year are the casualties of a Government that has made a priority of saving a delinquent bank”.

Ministers shrug off the 100,000 emigrants as the casualties of war, she said. “They are no such thing. They are the deliberate casualties of a set of policies that gives priority to the rescue of one particular bank and one building society, whose sole claim to fame is that they were joined at the hip to Fianna Fáil in the boom years.”

She said Taoiseach Brian Cowen had got everything wrong from the day he entered the Department of Finance “right up to the catastrophic decision on that fateful night when he opted to protect Anglo Irish Bank at any price with a blanket guarantee”.

Delegate Victor Duggan told the conference that “some of my best friends are bankers”, but that they had nothing to do with senior executives.

They were honest, hardworking “lions led by donkeys, fat cat bankers and mickey mouse regulators”, he said.

On September 29th, 2008, the night the bank guarantee was given, the Government “couldn’t face the music and went for double or quits” in a move that has cost every taxpayer €13,000, he added.

Joanna Tuffy, TD for Dublin Mid-West, said that because the State would become a majority shareholder of “most of our banks, bankers will become public servants”.

She said some people maintained that “if you want good bankers at the top you have to pay more”, but the reality was one of “bankers at the top on obscene salaries, who were gamblers and speculators”.