AIB's former group general manager has rejected as invalid a claim by a colleague that problems with non-resident accounts in the Republic could run into hundreds of millions of pounds.
Mr Brian Wilson, now working for the World Bank in Paris, said the letter written in January 1991 by the then group internal auditor, Mr Tony Spollen, came as "a bolt out of the blue" to him.
Mr Spollen had told the committee that in January 1991 he wrote to the internal auditor for Ireland, Mr Don Walsh, asking him to quantify the amount of "false Form F money on the books" and he said "the estimated £350 million to £400 million which you have given me is frightening".
Mr Spollen then wrote to Mr Wilson that Mr Don Walsh had informed him that documentation for one-third of the non-resident accounts sampled were not bona fide forms and the problem could run into hundreds of millions.
Mr Spollen also said Mr Wilson was aware of and considering the situation. Mr Wilson told the committee he had worked closely with Mr Walsh and he had never mentioned the problem to him.
However, Mr Walsh "came to see me and he wanted to make it clear that the numbers in the letter were not correct, that he had not made that statement to Mr Spollen, that he couldn't stand over those numbers, and that the only way you could know these numbers was to do a branch by branch, account by account, trawl".
They had a problem of "compliance, poor documentation, a lack of standards and a lack of rigour and we had a programme under way, as we saw it in 1990, to address this", Mr Walsh said.
Mr Spollen had earlier told the committee that before 1991 they had not prepared any analysis of the extent of bogus accounts. He had no sense of a problem of that magnitude. Mr Pat Rabbitte TD asked him how he could insist that, as group internal auditor, he did not know until 1991 that there was a problem.
Mr Spollen said he had often asked himself why he had not got that deep sense of the magnitude of the problem. He told the committee there was £600 million at the time in 53,000 non-resident accounts with a potential DIRT liability of £10 million for six months.
Earlier, the group chief executive, Mr Tom Mulcahy, said the bank had no disagreement with the findings in the Comptroller and Auditor General's report in relation to AIB "which we believe sets out the position accurately".
