The trader at the centre of €860 million fraud scandal at AIB's US subsidiary bank, Allfirst Financial, has this evening made a statement through his lawyer.
Mr John Rusnak who is alleged to have disguised huge foreign exchange losses with fictitious trades was earlier reported to be on the run.
However a lawyer for Mr Rusnak said his client did not steal from AIB and that he had not gone into hiding. He also said Mr Rusnak was still in the Baltimore area.
The FBI has been brought in to investigate the charges, but said it had not issued a warrant for Mr Rusnak.
Earlier the chairman of AIB, Mr Lochlann Quinn said that none of the banks’s customers or staff are at risk as a result of the fallout from the fraud scandal at Allfirst.
Shares in AIB closed over 16 per cent down on the Dublin and New York markets today after the company admitted it had uncovered the fraud at its main American subsidiary.
An estimated €2 billion has been wiped off the company's value following the share price fall.
Mr Quinn did not rule out the possibility that Mr John Rusnak - the currency dealer at the centre of the fraud - was assisted buy other employees of Allfirst to conceal his losses from foreign exchange deals. Mr Quinn added that there may also have been external collusion to falsify documentation related to the deals.
Mr Rusnak who worked at Allfirst's headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland, has since disappeared. A number of other senior executives at the bank have been suspended pending investigations by AIB and the FBI.
At a press conference in Dublin this morning Mr Michael Buckley, AIB's chief executive, said there were indications of collusion with the individual involved "by either somebody else within the organisation, or with some external parties."
Mr Buckley said: "It's a very heavy blow to the bank. This was a complex and a very determined fraud. We will be writing off the money in our 2001 accounts."
"The investigation into how this happened is still going on. We have concentrated so far on discovering how much money is involved. That is our first responsibility - then to notify our shareholders and the markets as soon as possible, which is what we have done."
He said the trader had been "using artificially created trades to offset losses he had been making on real trades".
Mr Buckley added: "This has been a blow, but AIB is still very strongly capitalised. The basis under which it is doing business has not been undermined."
Mr Buckley said the bank's investigation began a few weeks ago and came to a head last weekend.
"I was informed on Monday night. We sent out a team from our treasury on the first plane yesterday. "The extent and size of this only crystalised in the last few days", he added.