Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am not trying to shout down the Minister. I was trying to offer him the rationale behind my point. He said he did not understand why I mention the nationalisation of a bank overnight and I was trying to explain the reason. I will take a minute to further explain why I used that example.

When it comes to trying to rescue banks or bail out bankers, it can happen overnight. It has happened that way. I am not saying it was right or wrong but that the system can do that.

However, consider those same individuals, namely, the bankers, people who stole family homes from people, people who took hundreds of millions of euro out of bank accounts and people in financial institutions that have been involved in rogue deals and insider trading. When it comes to holding them to account, it is not done overnight, in a month, in a year or in two, three or four years. It took the Minister four and a half years after the Central Bank publicly requested these powers to bring forward heads of a Bill. He asked me to explain why I do not believe it is because of the legal difficulties. What is the reason? I believe it is that the Minister did not give this enough priority. This was not top of his agenda. Holding these individuals to account is not top of his agenda. That is the problem. If he, as Minister for Finance, said this must happen then it would not have taken four and a half years to get whatever legal clarity was required on this legislation which, in the main, is a mirror image of what is already in place in Britain. That is the problem here. That is my view. That is my consideration in relation to it.

I welcome this. We have been calling for years for this type of legislation. I wish to make a point on holding individuals to account. We see it in the inquiry under way by the Central Bank in relation to the former senior executive, I understand, in Permanent TSB. The issue here is if a person is found to be in breach then the maximum penalty is a €1 million. That is the current legislation. This Bill does not do anything to increase that sanction. Under the heads of this Bill, it might be head 5, it deals with that issue again. Does the Minister believe that is an appropriate monetary sanction for an individual? Let me give him an example. I mentioned insider trading and the finding made against Davy by the Central Bank. A number of those who were found against in Davy were shareholders of the company itself; indeed the 16 owned 33%. The sale of Davy benefited five individuals, a number of whom were involved in this transaction, to the tune of €185 million. What detriment is there if you are playing for those type of stakes and that type of reward? How is a sanction of €1 million sufficient? The question my colleague asked last week was: what provisions are in this Bill to ensure this will be personally sanctioned against the individual, as opposed to the company paying the bill for the individual or individuals concerned? We ask this because the individual who could be found against could be a senior shareholder or indeed the CEO.