Professor William Black:

We have not set this up but I thank Deputy Doherty. My answer is not in response to Ireland. I am not talking about Ireland. I am responding to the generic question. Here is an example of that dated 15 July 1987 from Charles Keating, our most notorious fraud in the savings and loan crisis to his chief political fixer. “Highest priority - get Black. Good grief - if you can't get Wright [the Speaker of the House] and Congress to get Black - kill him dead - you ought to retire." That is the kind of thing I am talking about. Our joke in the savings and loan crisis was the highest return on assets was always a political contribution for any banker. In our context, the Speaker of the House held hostage our Bill to get funding to close the institutions, to extort special favours for several fraudulent Texas savings and loan branches. Five US Senators who became known as the Keating Five sought to keep us from taking enforcement action against the worst fraud. The President of the United States attempted to appoint two members, chosen by Charles Keating, to run the agency. I told the committee it was a three presidential appointee agency that ran it. A Mr. Phelan, doubtless a distant cousin, was hired by the House ethics committee to investigate the ethics complaints against the Speaker of the House, James Wright. He did resign at the end of this process, but three of the recommended charges by Mr. Phelan after his investigation were that an ethics case should be brought against the Speaker of the House for his effort to fire William Black, his effort to fire Joe Selby, who was one of those two top regulators I told the committee about, and because he held hostage our funding to extort favours on behalf of folks.

In the United States context, these people do not go quietly. If you bring cases against powerful bankers, they will enlist their political allies and they will give very large political contributions to do that. In our context, Alan Greenspan was used to recruit the Keating Five, the five US Senators. He was hired as a lobbyist initially by Charles Keating to recruit those Senators. The United States is not unusual in those terms. If you take on really powerful bankers you will find that you get political push-back. If you do not pick regulators who will stand up to that – this is what I referred to as the Mike Patriarca level - Mike Patriarca was asked by a US Senator, one of the five who was meeting with us, whether he was saying that Arthur Young & Company, then one of the top tier audit firms, would prostitute itself for a client. Committee members, as legislators, know that if they ask that of a bureaucrat what the only possible answer is. When there are five Senators the only possible answer is, “Oh no sir, I would never say that.” The actual answer from Mike Patriarca was “Absolutely, it happens all the time.”