THOSE WHO committed criminal acts in relation to the banking crisis should go to jail “for sure”, governor of the Central Bank Prof Patrick Honohan told a plenary conference of the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly in Cavan yesterday.
He was responding to a question from Fine Gael TD Joe McHugh who asked if he agreed with “the ordinary man in the street” who was “advocating that people should go to jail and heads should be on a plate as a result of this fiasco”.
Prof Honohan said: “You don’t go to jail for making mistakes, but you do – and I think should – go to jail for criminal acts, if they can be proven and if they are criminal acts that entail a jail sentence.
“So I have no hesitation about that. It’s another matter as to whether it’s easy to achieve convictions on highly complex matters, which are made highly complex in some cases in order to make convictions difficult to achieve.”
Speaking to reporters after his presentation, Prof Honohan said: “Certain people doing financial transactions – say, illegal, or transactions we wouldn’t like them to make – might make them complex in order to hide them from the law.”
He emphasised that he was not suggesting that the law itself had been in any way “tricked up” to protect wrongdoers from prosecution.
“It’s not a populist notion that somebody should go to jail if they have committed criminal offences. If people have committed criminal offences, there’s no way I would be wanting to stand in the way of them going to jail.”
Asked if there had been any activities in the banking sector which, in his view, would merit people being brought before the courts, he replied: “There are certain matters which are currently under investigation by the gardaí. I’m not going to comment on them, but they are under investigation by the gardaí.”
Earlier at the assembly, he was asked by Cork South-West TD Jim O’Keeffe about the development whereby the Government had put €3.5 billion into each of the two main banks which were to pay an 8 per cent dividend but the European Commission put a “dividend-stopper” on such payments and the Bank of Ireland had recently given an equity stake of €280 million instead of a cash dividend.
Prof Honohan told the assembly: “There are different ways of getting the money in. The Bank of Ireland now still have the quarter of a billion that they would otherwise have paid over, so they won’t need that quarter of a billion when they are recapitalised.
“I don’t think we should get very excited about this transaction, which is, in the overall scheme of things, a relatively modest transaction and I don’t think it entails any kind of obstacle to what will be done in the recapitalisation,” said Prof Honohan, who was appointed governor of the Central Bank last September.