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“It seems extraordinary that NAMA did not know who the legal advisors to Cerberus were until after the Project Eagle portfolio was sold. Someone should be fired for incompetence”, Wallace told Village

Mick Wallace nails the £4.5bn dog, looking for proper investigation of Cerberus and other portfolios

News Miscellany

Quays, pees, pleas Years after they banned trucks from the riverside, Villager’s principal experience of Ormond Quay in front of the Village office is still really just somewhere to get run over. The gentlemen from Eircom have kindly removed the two drug dealers’ telephone boxes outside the door, so urine from the city’s drunkards can now flow undiverted into the gutters but it is still difficult to be enthusiastic. It is very difficult to love the River Liffey. It’s not somewhere from which you hear the peals of joyous children at swim or at play. This magazine has in the past promoted the idea of a jungle from O’Connell St to Heuston but the city fathers will never do anything until it has been tried and tested in Leicester and Wolverhampton and a decade or two passed. So it is no surprise that plans for pedestrianisaton, less still greening, of the quays have been botched for want of civic imagination and civic bottle. Nevertheless it is encouraging that Dublin City Council, is keeping its nerve on a quayside cycle route, for the moment. In the teeth of residents’ pleas, it intends, we hear, to permanently ban private cars and lorries from Ellis and Arran quays, on the north side of the river, and to divert vehicular traffic for 1.5km through the residential streets of Stoneybatter, Dublin’s Greenwich Village, and Smithfield, Dublin’s Times Square. While diverting traffic into residential areas is, as Councillor Mannix Flynn says, unethical, there is no option and the hope must be that all, especially the discommoded residents, will make life so difficult for blasted cars that they simply stay at home, or in the ground. Menxit The case that Brexit was about the underclass, globalisation, and rising inequality has been inconveniently assailed by poll data presented by Professor Danny Dorling, Professor of Geography at Oxford University in a report for BBC’s ‘Newsnight’. “The vote to leave Europe was largely a middle class, English vote”, he has concluded.   Meaningful surnames As part of his ongoing quest to link surnames to appropriate occupations or behaviour, Villager notes: May Theresa May is most interesting for whether she may Not. Gunning Fatima Gunning, an anti-abortion zealot, recently posed in a Repeal jumper with a banner designed to discredit her opponents, appealing implausibly for “abortion for terminally ill babies”. Handler, Jolie, Pitt Jennifer Aniston’s interests are well mediated by her pal Chelsea Handler who, among other things, recently ripped into pretty Angelina Jolie on her Netflix comedy show, berating her husband for getting involved with her in the first place. The outspoken TV host called Jolie a “f***ing lunatic” who had driven badly-behaved Brad Pitt to booze and pot as an escape. She went on: “Maybe because he could have been spending the last 12 years at Lake Como hanging out with George Clooney and Matt Damon, instead of being stuck in a house with 85 kids speaking 15 different languages”. Someone noticed Village, it’s Trump… Donald Trump quoted and linked to a profile of Denis O’Brien written by the editor and published in Village in the candidate’s press release indicting the media mogul’s links to the Clintons. The passage stated that O’Brien “is a mate of former President, Bill Clinton. Indeed he flew him to the recent Dublin Castle beano in his jet, and later paid the tab for a late-nighter in the Unicorn restaurant, with Clinton, the strangely ever-present Séamus Heaney, and 22 others”. …but, maybe, not the Irish Times A piece by investigative Titan, Peter Murtagh, in the Irish Times documenting Trump’s press release recorded the other six organs cited but strangely omitted Village, which is usually hysterical about the Irish Times and once said its nice editor, Kevin O’Sullivan, should resign when his failure to publish part of the Dáil transcript of Catherine Murphy’s allegations about Denis O’Brien’s banking arrangments was found, as it surely later was, by the High Court to be legally without any grounds. Not O’Reilly And we can add Trump to the list of people who may have commissioned the mysterious Red Flag dossier on O’Brien! What are you doing, Caitriona Perry? The media, led by RTÉ continually report that Denis O’Brien still “challenges” the findings of the Moriarty Tribunal that he channelled £867,000 to Michael Lowry after Lowry had granted the third mobile-phone licence to O’Brien’s Esat in 1995. Since there is no sign of a legal challenge to the Tribunal’s findings – indeed a challenge would be out of time – the word can only be being used in a sense so weak that it is scarcely worth bothering with. They all partied The IMF is urging governments to tackle record global debt of $152tr, 225% of global GDP and rising, with the private sector responsible for two-thirds of the total. The debt level is more than twice the size of the global economy and unprecedented as a proportion of GDP, the Fund says. So if the world wanted a mortgage, it wouldn’t get one. One-way? The EU is sponsoring free Interrail passes for all 18-year-olds. Why not one for everyone in the UK? Missed that meeting Villager’s favourite soccer and Olympics administrator, John Delaney, issued a release saying he “had no knowledge or awareness of PRO 10 or its position as the Olympic Council of Ireland’s ticket reseller”. It is strange that he would have no knowledge of it as PRO 10 has donated over €50k in sponsorship to the OCI of which Delaney is eminent Vice-President. Labour Party ideology A policy introduced in 2012 by former minister for social protection Joan Burton, of compelling lone parents to look for work could make families poorer, according to a Government-commissioned report from the UNESCO Child and Family Research Centre at NUI Galway. It was part of the move since the late 1980s from passive to active labour market policies within the Irish welfare state. ‘Lone Parents and Activation, What Works and Why’ includes a review of international experience of

A man whose body was found in the Dublin mountains on Friday 30 September had successfully campaigned to have a quarrying operation in the area closed down last year. Michael McCoy, a father of three in his early sixties, who was last seen walking his dogs in the Brittas area of county Dublin on the previous day, was a leading member of the Dublin Mountain Conservation Group. Last October, he won a landmark judgment when the High Court ordered the closure of the quarrying operation on the site of the 465 metre Butler Mountain near Brittas, county Dublin. Ms Justice Marie Baker ordered that the unauthorised quarrying by Shillelagh Quarries Ltd should cease and remediation work carried out. McCoy’s successful application for an order to cease the quarrying operations on a 3.27 hectare area of a larger 25-hectare site was supported by South Dublin County Council. Two special areas of conservation (SACs) are located near the quarry site. The case was taken against Shillelagh Quarries Ltd and the site owners. According to the heritage officer of An Taisce, Ian Lumley, McCoy was a committed environmentalist whose main concern was that developments in the scenic Dublin mountain area where he lived should comply with the law. This despite much of the media implausibly describing the killing as resulting from a “land dispute”. “I was in regular contact with Mr McCoy over the years”, Lumley told Village. “He was very focused on the surrounding environment. All he was concerned with was that development activity should be in compliance with the law. He was a reasonable, measured and sensible person who was also realistic when it came to the legal process. He campaigned about illegal dumping, quarrying activities and development generally if he felt they threatened the environment”. In her judgment last year, Judge Baker rejected a claim by the quarry operators and landowners that the works had commenced before the coming into force of planning legislation in 1964 and were therefore exempted and not unauthorised. She also rejected their argument that the case was time barred and/or that the council and Mr McCoy were guilty of such prolonged and unexplained delay that the court should refuse the orders sought. Ms Justice Baker said Shillelagh Quarries Ltd. had carried out their commercial activities despite a refusal of their application for planning permission by An Bord Pleanála in 2010. She said that the quarrying work had “created a discordant landscape in an area of exceptional public amenity”. A man believed to have been known to Mr McCoy was arrested and later released without charge a day after the discovery of the dead man’s body close to a forest track at Ballinascorney Hill near Brittas at 4.00 a.m. on the Friday morning. A file has been prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions. The distress of McCoy’s family has been aggravated by the disappearance of one of their long-tailed boxer dogs and they have issued pleas for help in finding the dog, who was seen on the Ballinascorney Road, and asked anyone finding her to take her to the DSPCA.   Imminent judgment in ‘Three Trouts’ defamation action Elsewhere, Judge Baker is expected to deliver her judgment later this month in the long running defamation case brought by a member and former member of Wicklow County Council against the council and now retired county manager, Eddie Sheehy. Councillor Tommy Cullen and former councillor Barry Nevin took the action following comments in a press release issued by the council in April 2013 which accused the politicians of making “unfounded and misconceived” allegations in relation to the compulsory purchase of lands by the council close to Three Trout stream at Charlesland near Greystones several years previously. The press release said that the “misconceived” allegations of Cullen and Nevin has resulted in a loss to the Council of circa €200,000 in respect of interest foregone and administrative costs in addition to the costs of an independent review commissioned by then environment minister, Phil Hogan into the CPO. The defamation claim was first rejected by the Circuit Court two years ago but the decision was appealed and the case continued for several weeks in the High Court earlier this year. Councillor Cullen last week met environment minister, Simon Coveney, and asked him to complete the long promised review by his department into a series of allegations in relation to planning and rezoning matters, as well as illegal dumping, in county Wicklow.   By Frank Connolly  

Since the start of the Global Financial Crisis back in 2008, European and US policymakers and regulators have blamed the international banking system for systemic risks and abuses. Regulatory and supervisory authorities have begun designing and implementing system-wide responses to the causes of the crisis. What emerged from these efforts was an explosion of regulatory authorities. Regulatory, supervisory and compliance jobs mushroomed, turning legal and compliance departments into a new Klondike, mining the rich veins of regulations, frameworks and institutions. The edifice, it was presumed, would address the causes of the recent crisis and create systems that can robustly prevent future financial meltdowns. At the forefront of these global reforms are the EU and the US which took two distinct approaches to beefing up their responses to the systemic crises. Yet, the outrun of the reforms is the same. The US has adopted a reform path focused on restructuring of the banks – with the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act the cornerstone. The capital adequacy rules closely followed the Basel Committee which sets these for the global banking sector. The US regulators have been pushing the folk at Basel to create a common ‘floor’ or level of capital a bank cannot go below. Under the US proposals, the ‘floor’ will apply irrespective of its internal risk calculations, reducing banks’ and national regulators’ ability to game the system, while still claiming the banks remain well-capitalised. Beyond that, the US regulatory reforms primarily aim to strengthen the enforcement arm of banking supervision. Enforcement actions have been flying since the ‘recovery’ set in, in 2010. Meanwhile, the EU has gone about the business of rebuilding its financial markets in a traditional, European, way. Any reform momentum became an excuse to create more bureaucratese and to engineer ever more Byzantine, technocratic schemes in the hope that somehow the uncertainties created by the skewed business models of banks get entangled in a web of paperwork, making the crises if not impossible at least impenetrable to the ordinary punters. Over the last eight years, Europe created a truly shocking patchwork of various ‘unions’, directives, authorities and boards – all designed to make the already heavily centralised system of banking regulation even more complex. The ‘alphabet soup’ of European reforms includes: • the EBU and the CMU (the European Banking and Capital Markets Unions, respectively); • the SSM (the Single Supervisory Mechanism) and the SRM (the Single Resolution Mechanism), under a broader BRRD (Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive) with the DGS (Deposit Guarantee Schemes Directive); • the CRD IV (Remuneration and prudential requirements) and the CRR (Single Rule Book); • the MIFID/R and the MAD/R (enhanced frameworks for securities markets and to prevent market abuse); • the ESRB (the European Systemic Risk Board); • the SEPA (the Single Euro Payments Area); • the ESA (the European Supervisory Authorities) that includes the EBA (the European Banking Authority); • the MCD (the Mortgage Credit Directive) within a Single European Mortgage Market; the former is also known officially as CARRP and includes introduction of something known as the ESIS; • the Regulation of Financial Benchmarks (such as LIBOR & EURIBOR) under the umbrella of the ESMA (the European Securities and Markets Authority), and more. The sheer absurdity of the European regulatory epicycles is daunting. Eight years of solemn promises to end the egregious abuses of risk management, business practices and customer trust in the American and European banking should have produced at least some results when it comes to cutting the flow of banking scandals and mini-crises. Alas, as recent events illustrate, nothing could be further from the truth. America’s Rotten Apples In the Land of Freedom [from individual responsibility], American bankers are wreaking havoc on customers and investors. The latest instalment in the saga is the largest retail bank in North America, Wells Fargo. Last month, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced a $185m settlement with the bank. It turns out the customer-focused Wells Fargo created over two million fake accounts without customers’ knowledge or permission, generating millions of dollars in fraudulent fees. But Wells Fargo is not alone. In July 2015, Citibank settled with CFPB over charges that it deceptively mis-sold credit products to 2.2 million of its own customers. The settlement was many times greater than that of Wells Fargo, at $700m. And in May 2015, Citicorp, the parent company that controls Citibank, pleaded guilty to a felony manipulation of foreign currency markets – a charge brought against it by the Justice Department. Citicorp was joined in the plea by another US banking behemoth, JPMorgan Chase. You heard it right: two of the largest US banks are felons. And there is a third one about to join them. This month news broke that Morgan Stanley was charged with “dishonest and unethical conduct” in its dealings in Massachusetts securities “for urging brokers to sell loans to their clients”. A snapshot of the larger cases involving Citi and its parent company shows they have faced fines and settlement costs of over $19bn between 2002 and 2015. Today, the CFPB has over 29,000 consumer complaints against Citi and 37,000 complaints against JP Morgan Chase outstanding. Citi was the largest recipient of the US Fed bailout package that followed the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. It obtained heavily subsidised loans totalling $2.7tr or roughly 16 percent of the entire bailout in the US. But there have been no prosecutions of Citi, JP Morgan Chase or Wells Fargo executives. Europe’s Ailing Dinosaurs This state protection is matched in the case of another serial abuser of market rules: Deutsche Bank. According to US Government Accountability Office (GAO) data, during the 2008-2010 crisis Deutsche got $354bn of emergency financial assistance from the US authorities. In contrast, Lehman Brothers got only $183bn. Last month, Deutsche entered into talks with the US Department of Justice over the settlement for mis-selling mortgage-backed securities. The original fine was set at $14bn – enough to effectively wipe out the capital reserves cushion in Europe’s largest bank. Latest financial-market rumours