It may be 17 years to the week since Brian Cowen’s government guaranteed the Irish banking system to stave off its collapse. And it’s only a matter of months before the wind-down of the successor company to Anglo Irish Bank (Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, or IBRC) is completed and outstanding matters are handed over a unit in the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA).
But the ghosts of Anglo’s past continue still linger in some long-forgotten places.
An inquiry that Chartered Accountants Ireland’s (CAI) professional standards unit, formerly known as Carb, started off in 2009 into Anglo’s boom-era auditor EY is one such example.
An external report, completed by former comptroller and auditor general John Purcell for the accountancy body in 2011, found that there was a prima facie case that EY was liable to disciplinary action in connection with certain aspects of its Anglo audits.
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The report said the firm had failed to detect the scale of loans that former chairman Sean FitzPatrick had a habit of moving off balance at the end of the bank’s accounting period. EY also needed to explain its failure to refer to money flows between Irish Life & Permanent into Anglo in 2008 that served to flatter the latter’s deposits base, the report said.
EY has long rejected the findings of the report and failed in 2011 in a High Court bid to halt the CAI’s disciplinary investigation.
Purcell’s report was placed in cold storage in 2011 as the Director of Public Prosecutions wanted to allow the criminal trials to work their way through the courts. However, the last of these cases came to a conclusion over seven years ago.
A civil lawsuit that IBRC’s liquidators took in 2012 against EY over alleged failings in its work on Anglo before the financial crisis ended up being settled in early 2023.
The CAI has also long concluded disciplinary cases against former Anglo figures following the crash, including FitzPatrick and bubble-era chief executive David Drumm.
So, what’s the holdup with CAI on EY? The accountancy body isn’t saying. Nor are representatives for EY.
CAI’s annual report for 2024 contained a note highlighting that it had a provision of €1.5 million for ongoing public concern cases, including the disciplinary case in respect of Anglo. Will it ever be concluded?
