Last summer a young man was caught urinating on the street in front of an AIB cash dispenser in central Dublin. When he appeared in court, the judge ordered him to stand in front of the same bank machine with a sign admitting what he had done and apologising to the public for his bad behaviour.
A few months later the senior management of Allied Irish Banks itself was on the receiving end of one of the most stinging indictments ever of a respected Irish institution. The report of the Dail's Public Accounts Committee investigation into the evasion of DIRT found, essentially, that the bank had performed on the public a similar act to the one that young man had performed in front of its cash dispenser.
It might have been nice if the top management of the company had stood in O'Connell Street with big signs around their necks saying "I apologise". Instead, as we learned on Tuesday, they awarded themselves pay increases of 10 per cent for 1999, with the total remuneration packages of the five executive directors rising from £3.05 million in 1998 to £3.35 million last year.
We know from the PAC report that most of the senior management in AIB was aware through much of the 1980s and the 1990s that the bank had massive numbers of bogus non-resident accounts which were established for the sole purpose of illegally evading tax. Many of those in charge at the bank during the critical years of this scam have since retired. It is fair to say that the present leadership of the bank did not actually create the mess.
BUT IT is equally obvious from the PAC report that the present bosses at the bank were extraordinarily slow to accept responsibility for what had happened and to take steps to put things right by paying what they owed.
After 1998, by which time most of the present AIB management was in place, the bank's problems with DIRT were public knowledge. Articles had been published in the Sunday Independent and Magill magazine, the latter detailing the assessment of AIB's own internal auditor in 1990 that there was a contingent DIRT liability of £100 million. It was up to the present leadership, including the group chief executive, Tom Mulcahy, and chairman, Lochlann Quinn, to pay what they owed.
Late in 1998 and early last year, indeed, AIB undertook a "look-back exercise" to establish its potential DIRT liability. On the evidence of both Mr Mulcahy and Mr Quinn, they figured they might owe as much as £35 million. Yet the bank stressed that the purpose of this exercise was not to discover what was owed and pay up but to "rebut media reports of a potential liability of £100 million".
This was, in other words, an exercise not in corporate responsibility, but in spin control. Instead of approaching the Revenue and offering to pay even the £35 million, AIB, especially in the person of Tom Mulcahy, continued to insist that it had an informal amnesty deal with the Revenue. The PAC, of course, found that this claim was spurious.
Yet Tom Mulcahy was rewarded by the bank in 1999 with a salary of £475,000, a company car and other benefits worth £31,000, pension contributions of £74,000 and, believe it or not, a bonus of £237,000. The total package amounted to £850,000, or about 50 times the earnings of a bus-driver.
Lochlann Quinn was asked at the PAC hearings what provision was put into the bank's financial statements for March 31st, 1999, in relation to what he himself thought could be a DIRT liability of £35 million. His reply: "Nothing." He was also asked: "What procedures have you personally put in place to ensure that all of the laws of this country are fully complied with in every respect by all of the management and staff at head office and branch level in AIB?"
His reply: "None. I have put no procedure personally in place in the bank since I became chairman."
For his part-time role as chairman in 1999, Lochlann Quinn was paid £149,000, or about seven times what a bus-driver gets for working a 60-hour week.
Or consider Kevin Kelly, now head of retail banking at AIB. His involvement with the DIRT saga goes back to the early 1990s, when he was group finance director. He read the alarming internal audit reports. In April 1992, however, he told the Central Bank that "he was satisfied that the [DIRT] situation was now in order".
Mr Kelly is also the chairman of the Council of the Irish Bankers' Federation, a post he also held in 1996. Asked by Jim Mitchell at the PAC hearings whether the IBF had any equivalent to the codes of ethics that apply to the medical and legal professions, he replied "No".
Mr Mitchell: There are no ethical standards?
Mr Kelly: No.
Last year Mr Kelly received a salary of £219,000, benefits of £26,000 and a bonus of £113,000. His total package amounted to £425,000, or about 20 times that of a bus-driver.
It doesn't seem to matter that AIB was exposed to justified public scorn at the PAC hearings, that crucial parts of its evidence were utterly disbelieved by the committee, or that it colluded in depriving the State of very significant revenue at a time when poverty, unemployment and squalor were visibly rampant. It doesn't seem to matter that enormous damage has been done to the bank's long-term reputation for corporate governance and social responsibility.
It doesn't even seem to matter that the bank may end up owing well over £100 million in back taxes which will be very difficult to recoup from the holders of the bogus accounts.
As for wider considerations about the message sent to people like the striking bus-drivers, the hopelessness of even mentioning them is all too obvious. If making a spectacular mess of the basic task of obeying the law results in massive bonuses all round, talk of setting a good example would be painfully naive. The one consolation is that we will be spared all that hypocrisy about being responsible and relating wages to performance.
Won't we?
fotoole@irish-times.ie