Taoiseach Enda Kenny has denied he secretly briefed Anglo Irish Bank executives over rumours about the rogue lender’s future in the weeks before it was nationalised.
In tough exchanges at the Oireachtas banking inquiry, the taoiseach rejected claims in emails that he passed information to the toxic bank’s chief financial officer and fellow Castlebar native Matt Moran in 2008.
“I made a call because I was asked to make a call and that he had something to say to me,” Mr Kenny said.
“In any event I had no conversation of any substance with Mr Moran.”
The inquiry heard claims the then opposition leader called Mr Moran on November 17 and 18 2008 to brief him on rumours of how the bust lender was to be dealt with in the wake of the 440 billion euro bank guarantee.
The taoiseach said he only picked up the phone after Mr Moran’s brother Michael, a Castlebar businessman, asked him to.
Emails purportedly from inside Anglo and published by the Sunday Independent in 2013 were read into the record by Sinn Féin finance spokesman Pearse Doherty.
One claims the then-Fine Gael leader told the executive the rogue lender was to be turned into “an offshoot of Bank of Ireland” while another suggestion was that a deal was being planned between Anglo and the then-Irish Life & Permanent.
Mr Kenny said: “It was never my business to be in contact with senior members of banks in the first place.
“I made the call because I was asked to do it by his brother.
“I reject that assertion, or the allegations in that newspaper report, or that email completely.”
The taoiseach said he had one
boardroom meeting in 2008 with seven or eight Anglo executives, including then chief executive David Drumm, at the Stephen’s Green headquarters where a presentation was given that claimed the lender would come out of the recession fitter than any other.
Before being challenged on his associations with Anglo bankers, the taoiseach used his opening statement at the inquiry to level swingeing attacks on Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen’s tenure in government.
He said the lion’s share of blame for Ireland’s economic meltdown and banking crisis lay squarely with mismanagement during the Fianna Fáil-led coalitions from 2002-2007.
“By 2007, an uncompetitive, bloated, over-borrowed and distorted Irish economy had been left at the mercy of subsequent international events, without the safeguards, institutions and mindset needed to survive and prosper as a small open economy inside the euro area,” he said.
“By this point, the economic costs of the banking and wider collapse had already been incurred, even if the
true scale of the disaster would take several more years to fully reveal
itself.”
Mr Kenny added: “For hundreds of thousands of lrish families, however, their dreams turned into a nightmare, as boom turned to bust and as stability was replaced by policy recklessness and regulatory failures.
“To be sure, design flaws in the euro architecture as a whole contributed to the crisis here and elsewhere in the Eurozone.
“While much work remains to be done, these flaws are gradually being repaired.
“But the Iion’s share of the damage to the Irish economy was the fault of domestic economic and financial mismanagement.”
