Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 29 April 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Michael Buckley:

There ... thank you Deputy. I think there are several questions there, if you don't mind I'll answer them separately, is that okay, Chairman? So first of all, if I take the Allfirst one, that wasn't a case of defrauding customers; it was a case of defrauding the bank.

There was no customer detriment involved there. Second of all, in the FX charges, and I include other things in that as well in that particular area, in the principal issue there that gave rise to that whole scandal, there was no customer detriment. What had happened was, we as a bank, were required to get written approval in the mid-90s, I think it was 1996 or something like that, for our foreign exchange charges. We had failed to do that. The investigation then found that actually our charges in the marketplace were no worse than any other bank, so therefore we were not disadvantaging customers. Despite that, we went and remediated and refunded every customer that we could find. The third element, Faldor, was a situation where there was no customer detriment. This was a question as to whether, how will I say, a particular legal entity - an investment vehicle - had been given preferential treatment by our investment management arm. It wasn't anything about customer detriment.