Ms Isolde Goggin:

I will first address the criminal versus civil issue. In the case of a flat-out cartel, that is, a price fixing, market sharing or bid-rigging cartel in which people sat down in a room and said they would get together and make a specific agreement to cheat their customers, we would always regard that as a criminal matter. The issue with civil cases is there are no fines. We do not have civil fines in Ireland. We do not have the power the Central Bank, for example, has to fine entities, which it authorises, because they operate within a regulated sector. We always regard flat-out cartel activity as being so serious that we want to take the criminal route, we want to get it into the Central Criminal Court and we want fines and penalties on individuals, as well as on the company. The problem with this is one must be extremely careful about how one gets the evidence. Without pointing the finger, we have seen what happens when public agencies cut corners in carrying out a criminal investigation. We are not going there. We have recruited a serious, professional, criminal investigation division. We have a serving detective sergeant from the Garda national economic crime bureau. We have recruited experienced professional investigators from the ranks of retired gardaí and from members of other police forces. We are going down that route. In looking to use our search powers, it would mean going before a judge to get a search warrant, where we would need to be able to explain to the judge the reasons for looking for a search warrant for a particular institution for a particular type of behaviour. We cannot go on a fishing expedition; we would be thrown out of court. It may be two years down the road but we must think about that.

Looking at the behaviour of the banks, it is undoubtedly the case that they all started to withdraw tracker mortgages at the same time. It is also undoubtedly the case that they were losing their shirts on tracker mortgages, each and every one of them. During the period when the banks entered into tracker mortgages they assumed they would be able to borrow at or close to the European Central Bank base rate the whole time. The rate at which the banks were borrowing suddenly switched and they were not able to borrow at that rate any more. Looking at the situation on an individual basis, it was absolutely in each bank's interest to get people off tracker mortgages. Unfortunately this is what prompted a lot of what appears to have been highly unscrupulous behaviour. Without more, however, we cannot search for evidence on the basis that the banks did something that was clearly in their own financial interests to do, and which they had very good reasons to do. There were bad reasons in how they went about it but to request a grant of a warrant we would need something more than the fact that each bank did something in their own economic interest at that point.