Ireland’s Rogue bankers must be jailed Say’s Paul Appleby
Calls to get tough on reckless banks
Ireland’s Rogue bankers need to be jailed in order to restore public faith in the system, says ex-corporate watchdog Paul Appleby.
He has called for tougher penalties for white collar crime, including longer jail terms.
He believes the current penalties for financial offences — a fine of just €12,976 and six months in jail — are inadequate.
Mr Appleby (57), the former Director of Corporate Enforcement, said the law should try to criminalise “all forms of misconduct” in the banking sector.
His comments were aimed at anyone who has been found guilty of mismanaging a bank.
He insisted the sanctions “should anticipate the worst case” and be commensurate with the public consequences.
Mr Appleby spent three years leading the probes into alleged wrongdoing at major banks.
Since the financial crisis took hold, no banker has been found guilty of misconduct and jailed.
Speaking at a Law Reform Commission conference, Mr Appleby said reckless trading should be criminalised and mismanaging a bank should be an “indictable offence”.
Mr Appleby, in his first major speech since retiring last July, criticised the “weakness” of the legal system.
Financial regulator Matthew Elderfield also said the lack of action against the banking sector has damaged faith in the legal processes.
Despite pre-election promises, the Fine Gael/Labour Coalition has done little to toughen sanctions for white-collar crime.
While many small shareholders saw their retirement nest-eggs vanish with the crash, top executives were able to step down with massive pensions.
Mr Elderfield said he feared that public confidence in the enforcement system has been undermined by lack of action.
In addition, the country’s ability to “head off the next crisis or scandal” is weakened, he added.
Central Bank chief economist Lars Frisell questioned why bankers were rewarded with “colossal” bonuses for lending. But if losses were sustained as a result, they would not be seriously affected, he added.
Mr Appleby dropped a bombshell on ministers in February by announcing he was taking early retirement and leaving the corporate enforcement post.
But he subsequently postponed his retirement by a number of months to allow for the completion of certain investigations.
Government vows to close loophole preventing banks repossessing homes
The agreement is the Government’s economic blueprint for the year ahead and was finalised just weeks before Finance Minister Michael Noonan delivered Budget 2013.
The Government has promised to remove a legal loophole which has stopped banks repossessing properties.
The measure, which was contained in the quarterly agreement with the troika, won’t be introduced until borrowers’ homes are protected by the new personal insolvency legislation.
The Government will move to remove “unintended constraints on banks to realise the value of loan collateral under certain circumstances,” it said in the latest update to its bailout programme yesterday.
The move is likely to hit the 37,000 people who own buy-to-let homes and have a mortgage, as well as some of the 11,000 people who have restructured their loans. Until now, these landlords have been protected by the legal ruling that effectively made it impossible to repossess homes.
Before December 2009, banks used a 1964 law as the basis to repossess homes. This was repealed and replaced in 2009, which, due to a drafting oversight, applied only to loans taken out after December 1, 2009.
The flaw became apparent in a July 2011 case overseen by Judge Elizabeth Dunne. She ruled a lender wasn’t entitled to repossess a home used for security on a defaulting €93,000 loan because demand for repossession and repayment was made in July 2010.
The change to the law will be accompanied by a health service shake-up next year, including workplace and rostering reforms, according to the new agreement with the troika.
The report, compiled after the eighth review of Ireland’s bailout programme in November, also states that further cuts will be made to drugs costs and that health spending would be contained within the €13.6bn budget.
Health Minister James Reilly suffered criticism after the Department of Health incurred overruns of about €400m this year.
An increase in hospital charges for private patients also looks likely as the agreement pledges to improve the charging regime for private patients in public hospitals and increase the collection of charges to “fully account for costs”.
The agreement is the Government’s economic blueprint for the year ahead and was finalised just weeks before Finance Minister Michael Noonan delivered Budget 2013.
The troika agreement also states that the Credit Union movement must be restructured to ensure financial stability and long-term sustainability.
The Government pointed out that any public resources provided for the restructuring will be recouped via a levy on the credit union industry.
Some €250m will be transferred to a credit union fund by the end of this year.
It’s estimated that one in four credit unions is in trouble in the State, with regulators in the Central Bank demanding regular financial reports from those in difficulty and restricting the amount of loans they give out.
Other key pledges/demands:
- Commission for energy regulation responsible for overseeing the price-setting powers of Irish water.
- Government to set out its methodology for the next round of stress tests for banks.
- Ensure NAMA maintains high standards of governance, accountability and transparency, and reduces costs.
Stair study reveals calorie count and burn up climbing stairs
More energy is burnt up taking steps one at a time rather than rushing them two at a time, research shows
Taking the stairs one at a time burns more calories than leaping up multiple steps, researchers have said.
Although more energy is initially expended when taking the stairs two steps per stride, over time more energy is actually burnt up taking the stairs one at a time, researchers from the University of Roehampton said.
The research team found that, on average, when climbing five floors of stairs five times a week, 302 kcal would be burnt if taking the stairs one at a time, compared with 260 kcal if taking two steps with every stride.
Dr Lewis Halsey, senior lecturer in comparative and environmental physiology at the university, said: “We were really interested to find out what expended more energy overall – attacking the stairs two at a time and climbing them quickly, or taking them more sedately one step at a time and reaching the top more slowly.
“Our study reported the calories burned ascending stairs, the potential weight loss value of climbing stairs if done regularly and frequently during the week, and also the different energy costs of ascending stairs one step at a time versus two steps at a time.
“And our conclusion: it is better to take the stairs one at a time if you want to burn the most calories.”
The Pope tweets his flock with first blessing’s
As first tweets go, it was neither Earth- nor heaven-shattering. To much fanfare, Pope Benedict XVI yesterday sent his first tweet during his Wednesday public audience in the Vatican. Surrounded by a gaggle of helpers, Benedict pressed on his iPad to send off the tweet.
It read simply: “Dear Friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless you all from my heart.”
The pope’s reference to a generous response reflected the fact that by midday, he had gathered more than a million “followers”, just 10 days after the Holy See announced he would be tweeting from hashtag “@pontifex”.
Later in the morning, the pope sent out two other tweets, messages which indicate the manner in which Benedict will use this social network.
In his second tweet, he asks: “How can we celebrate the Year of Faith better in our daily lives?” He replies in his third tweet: “By speaking with Jesus in prayer, listening to what he tells you in the Gospel and looking for him in those in need.”
Later, he tweeted twice more. Replying to his question of how faith in Jesus can be lived “in a world without hope”, he replied: “We can be certain that a believer is never alone. God is the solid rock upon which we build our lives and his love is always faithful.”
If this all seems low-key, just look at the Dalai Lama’s first tweet: “His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Los Angeles, 21 February 2010.” Not exactly Earth-shattering.
To those who find it strange to see an 85-year-old who does all his writing by hand use Twitter, the Holy See’s Greg Burke responds: “This is a new market for ideas and the church should be there.” It seems @pontifex is here to stay.
Introducing assisted suicide is very radical’ says Dr Tony O’Brien
A leading Irish palliative care specialist has told the High Court he supports the total ban on assisted suicide here and believes it would be “entirely radical” for doctors “to try and kill pain by killing patients”.
Dr Tony O’Brien said the ban made the situation “crystal clear” for doctors and he feared its removal could result in vulnerable people opting to have their lives ended only so as not to be a burden on others. It was “quite impossible” to devise safeguards to protect such people and “nothing could be safer” than the ban.
A UK palliative care specialist, Prof Rob George, said offering the option of interfering in the dying process through assisted suicide “completely reclassifies the role of medicine” and “changes society fundamentally” as it involved reclassifying the intentional ending of a person’s life, at their request, as “a societally mandated good”.
This led to a “slippery slope” or “paradigm shift”, as in the Netherlands, where what started as voluntary euthanasia later became involuntary for those without capacity on grounds it was in their best interests and the possibility of offering euthanasia to children was now being discussed.
If assisted suicide were allowed for one group, there was an obligation to look to others who sought it and it also created a “moral hazard” for those who assisted in taking a life as they might suffer unforeseen consequences themselves.
Opponents in UK
In the UK, among the most vocal opponents of assisted suicide were disability groups, who believe it involves making assumptions about their quality of life, capacity and value when they are already at the receiving end of assumptions concerning their disabilities, he added.
Both doctors were giving evidence on behalf of the State in the continuing action by Marie Fleming (58) challenging the constitutionality of the ban on assisted suicide in section 2.2 of the Criminal Law Suicide Act.
Ms Fleming, who is in the final stages of multiple sclerosis, also wants orders requiring the DPP to outline the factors to be taken into account in deciding whether to prosecute.
Yesterday Dr O’Brien told Shane Murphy SC, for the State, he had 26 years experience with 30,000 dying or suffering patients, and believed Ms Fleming’s situation might be improved physically, emotionally and spiritually via engagement with palliative services at the highest level here.
When Ronan Murphy SC, for Ms Fleming, said he was instructed she had availed of every palliative care option offered to her and had not refused any treatment, Dr O’Brien said he believed she might benefit by re-engaging with the palliative care services.
Prof George said, by legalising assisted suicide, the notion of killing someone as a solution to a problem was being introduced and there is “no knowing where that will go”. Introducing adequate safeguards to prevent errors and abuses was an “insurmountable” task and legalising assisted suicide would lead to deaths of patients who had not expressed a wish to die.
Those jurisdictions that had legalised assisted suicide and euthanasia showed increasing numbers were availing of it, and the figures in the Netherlands were equivalent to 11,000 deaths a year in the UK, he said.
He was concerned about potential for abuse and unintentional coercion of people towards assisted suicide. This was not about “malicious people setting out to kill Grandma” but, for example, full-time family carers unintentionally expressing frustration at the person being cared for.
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