Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 29 April 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Michael Buckley:

I think that to some extent that was a coincidence but it would be foolish of me to say that that was totally a coincidence. I think there were some very important common threads between them. The thing I would say is that a common thread between them is that, to take the FX charges and related things first of all, those issues, by and large, referred back to the 1980s up to the early 90s, and the subsequent investigations found that in most cases the particular issues that had been brought to the regulator's attention and, via the regulator, to our attention, had been dealt with, by and large, during the course of the 1990s so there was a large element of history about them. To me, they were probably ... the FX charges was probably the most upsetting part personally to me of my time as CEO because it said that there was stuff going on there that, in terms of the values and principles that I would have had, that were contrary to those principles. Now ... but we did tear up the floorboards. I mean, I remember when the FX charges thing came up first, I was on television, and I said those very words. I said, 'This information about that issue has gone to the regulator and what we are going to do is not only to investigate that as far as it goes but we will tear up the floorboards on every issue of charges that we know about and we'll try to find anything that we don't know about", and we made a promise to customers that we would remediate every case of customer detriment, which we did. So that's ... I think that's the governance part of-----