A few years ago, a young man was caught urinating on the street in front of an AIB cash dispenser in central Dublin. When he appeared in court, the judge ordered him to stand in front of the same bank machine with a sign admitting what he had done and apologising to the public for his bad behaviour.
Wherever that young man is now, he must wonder what would have happened if, instead of urinating on the street in front of an AIB machine, he had urinated on the public from the top floor of AIB headquarters. Would the law have required him to display himself on the street with a sign round his neck saying "Sorry"?
AIB's management have repeatedly got away with large-scale breaches of the law. The first that came into the public domain didn't even create a scandal.
It emerged at the Beef Tribunal in 1992 that the bank had been routinely cashing bogus cheques for the Goodman organisation, to be used for under-the-counter payments to its staff. In just one particular year (1986) around €4.5 million was processed by AIB in what was a very obvious fraud designed to evade tax. Plant managers made out cheques in the names of non-existent hauliers or suppliers. These managers, who were well known in their local areas, went down to their local branches of AIB every Friday, handed in these patently fraudulent cheques made out to various names, and were given huge bundles of cash.
The bank was at best turning a blind eye to a massive tax fraud, at worst colluding in organised crime. The fact that similar operations were conducted on a regular basis in different parts of the country (Cahir, Bagenalstown, Dublin and Dundalk were all positively identified) suggested that this was a case, not of local failures, but of national strategy. Yet, when all of this was revealed, there was no Garda investigation, no Revenue scrutiny, and little media interest. The idea that the State's biggest bank might have ethical and legal responsibilities simply didn't arise.
Is it any wonder that a culture of impunity continued to prevail? We know from the Public Accounts Committee report that most of the senior management in AIB was aware through much of the 1980s and '90s that the bank had thousands of bogus non-resident accounts, established for the sole purpose of evading tax. The assessment of AIB's own internal auditor in 1990 that there was a contingent DIRT liability of £100 million became public knowledge in the late 1990s.
The bank's own official estimate of what it owed was £35 million - a gross underestimate but nevertheless a significant amount of money. The then AIB chairman, Lochlann Quinn, was asked at the PAC hearings what provision was put into the bank's financial statements for March 31st, 1999, in relation to what he himself thought could be a DIRT liability of £35 million. His reply? "Nothing."
He was also asked: "What procedures have you personally put in place to ensure that all of the laws of this country are fully complied with in every respect by all of the management and staff at head office and branch level in AIB?" He replied: "None. I have put no procedure personally in place in the bank since I became chairman."
The then chairman of the Council of the Irish Bankers' Federation, who happened to be Kevin Kelly, head of retail banking at AIB, was asked by the late Jim Mitchell whether the IBF had any equivalent to the codes of ethics that apply to the medical and legal professions, he replied: "No."
Yet at the moment when all of this was being revealed at the PAC hearings, the bank's top managers were awarded pay increases of 10 per cent for 1999, with the total remuneration packages of the five executive directors rising from £3.05 million to £3.35 million. Tom Mulcahy, who presented to the PAC the bank's case that it had done nothing wrong, and who resigned at the weekend as chairman of Aer Lingus, was rewarded by AIB in 1999 with a salary of £475,000, a company car and other benefits worth £31,000, pension contributions of £74,000 and a bonus of £237,000.
We now know, of course, that for a long time offshore accounts were an executive perk at AIB, a sweetener on top of the other goodies.
At the root of all of this is the belief that corporate crime is not really crime. How could it be when it is treated so lightly? We know that the scale of non-compliance with even the simplest provisions of company law is massive.
Last year, over 14,800 companies were struck off the register because they had failed to file a return for the year 2001. Yet just 32 companies were prosecuted for failure to file annual returns on time, of which 14 were convicted. Sixty-seven company directors were also prosecuted, of whom 39 were convicted. The total punishment of all these companies and directors? Less than €40,000 in fines. In 2003, the Director of Corporate Enforcement dealt with over 3,000 complaints of corporate misconduct (more than twice the number received in 2002). Convictions or other court orders were secured in just 33 cases.
So long as they get away with it, they will keep doing it.