Ms Derville Rowland:

It is not that the enforcement team cannot investigate an individual at the same time as looking at the firm but the Central Bank of Ireland operates under a number of legal frameworks. The fitness and probity framework, as we have heard, is a protective framework and it is one set of rules and requirements. The administrative sanctions framework has another set of rules and requirements.

The team operates by considering the issues and then doing an investigation. It keeps the options open in terms of avenues to take. An issue for the Central Bank in litigious or contested issues is when the choice is to use the administrative sanctions procedure, the law sets out the obligations rest with the firm. In order to pursue individuals, one has to demonstrate that the firm committed a breach. It is written in the legislation. One then has to show an individual participated in the breach committed by the firm and demonstrate his or her participation.

The approach in the investigations is to acquire the relevant facts and information, do the data trawl and get the information. The Senator will appreciate the Central Bank regulates from small firms to highly complex organisations with large scale operations and systems or complicated issues which is time consuming and meticulous. When I started as a lawyer, quite often the information we had only ran to hundreds of pages and sometimes thousands but it is normal for us to operate at large scale. It is the scale of the investigation and drilling down through all of those to acquire the relevant facts. The teams run open consideration-----