Donie's news Ireland BLOG Friday

Former Anglo Irish chairman Seán FitzPatrick released on bail

     

Sean FitzPatrick, former chief executive and chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, Former Anglo Irish Bank chairman and chief executive Seán FitzPatrick has appeared in court charged in connection with financial irregularities at the collapsed bank.

Mr FitzPatrick (64), of  Whitshed Road, Greystones, Co Wicklow, was charged under section 197 of the Companies Act with knowingly or recklessly making misleading, false or deceptive statements to the bank’s auditors. He was charged with making such statements on 12 occasions, twice a year, between 2002 and 2007.

Mr FitzPatrick, who was arrested by appointment at the Bridewell Garda station in Dublin this morning, could face penalties on indictment of a fine of up to €12,697 and/or a maximum sentence of up to five years in prison. He did not speak during the short hearing in court 2 of the Criminal Courts of Justice complex on Parkgate Street.

Det Insp Raymond Kavanagh, who is on secondment to the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement from the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation, gave details of Mr FitzPatrick’s arrest and caution during a short hearing at Dublin District Court.

He said that when each of the 12 charges was put to Mr Fitzpatrick he replied “no comment”.

Defence solicitor Michael Staines, for Mr FitzPatrick, told Judge Michael Walsh that his client had consented to coming to the Bridewell to be arrested at short notice.

Mr FitzPatrick, who was dressed in a navy suit, blue shirt and red tie, was released on bail on his own bond of €1,000.

Det Insp Kavanagh said he had no objection to bail so long as Mr FitzPatrick resided at his home address, signed on once a week at Irishtown Garda station and provided notice to the Garda of any plans to leave the State.

Judge Walsh ordered Mr FitzPatrick to appear again in court on March 1st, when he will be served with a book of evidence.

Increase in burglaries and fraud & all other crime down in Ireland

    

Official figures show an increase in burglaries and cases of fraud across the country. 
The Central Statistics Office said all other classifications of crime fell in the 12 months to the end of September.

Burglaries and related offences went up 7.9%, while fraud and deception jumped 6.2% to 325 cases.

Some of the biggest drops were in offences relating to weapons and explosives, which were down 17.4% and public order offences which were down 12%.

Overall homicide offences were down, including dangerous driving leading to death.

The decrease in the number of dangerous driving leading to death offences from 26 in the 12-month period ending in September 2011 to nine in the 12-month period ending in September 2012 may be due to the fact that all road collision investigations for this period have not yet concluded, which will result in some being reclassified as homicide.

For the 12-month period ending in September, there were 55 recorded murder and manslaughter offences, an increase of three on the same period in 2011.

All Irish bank Directors must be ‘accountable’

  

AIB public interest director Michael Somers said bank officials needed to be careful ‘that they’re not being hoodwinked’ when it came to writing down debt.

The public interest directors on the boards of State-backed banks must be made for accountable for the work they do on behalf of the taxpayer, the chairman of the Oireachtas finance committee Labour TD Ciaran Lynch has said.

Mr Lynch was speaking in the wake of revelations that none of the Government-appointed directors on the boards of AIB, Bank of Ireland and Permanent TSB had had any formal contacts with the Government since taking up their posts in 2009 and 2010.

“There are no terms of reference, there is no reporting structure to the Minister for Finance, the Department of Finance or the Central Bank or the Oireachtas for that matter, and there is no external evaluation processes put in place about how they actually perform their roles.”

Mr Lynch said this raised a serious question in terms of how this is going to be dealt with in the future.

Public interest directors from AIB and Bank of Ireland yesterday appeared before the Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, which is examining the role played by the public interest directors in State-backed banks.

Mr Lynch said the directors did give an account of their activities in terms of promoting new risk management protocols at the banks and other reforming measures. “But the real difficulty here is that there is a communication deficit and a deficit in how they actually account for themselves,” he told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland programme.

Former minister Joe Walsh, who was appointed to the board of the bailed-out bank in 2009, told the committee yesterday Bank of Ireland was offering mortgage restructuring options to 400-500 customers per week. He said 700 staff were now involved in the management of mortgage arrears and distressed debt.

Mr Walsh said the bank had restructured 16,000 mortgages, and over 86 per cent of those customers were meeting their contracted payments.

AIB public interest director Michael Somers said bank officials needed to be careful “that they’re not being hoodwinked” when it came to writing down debt. He said 2,000 staff at the bank were now employed in supporting customers experiencing difficulties with their loans.

“We will not be throwing people out on the streets, some deal will have to be cut and if that involves the writing down of debt then so be it.”

Minister for Justice Alan Shatter last night welcomed a clarification by Permanent TSB accepting the principle that some customer debt would have to be written off.

In a statement released yesterday the bank denied it had ruled out debt forgiveness and insisted it was committed to applying the terms of the Personal Insolvency Act.

The statement came 24 hours after one of its public interest directors, Ray MacSharry, ruled out any blanket debt forgiveness for its customers when he appeared before the same Oireachtas committee.

The former EU commissioner and finance minister made the comments on the same day as the Personal Insolvency Bill – which is designed to facilitate debt write-down – completed its passage through the Oireachtas.

‘Seriously out of touch’

His position prompted a strong reaction from Mr Shatter, who said Mr MacSharry should seriously consider the comments, which he said were “seriously out of touch”.

Mr Shatter, welcoming Permanent TSB’s commitment to work the personal insolvency legislation, said: “The bank is, of course, correct in saying that the financial circumstances of each person who seeks to enter into a Personal Insolvency Arrangement will have to be individually considered.”

He said it was crucial that every financial institution constructively engaged in the debt resolution processes that will be available under the Act.

A spokesman for Permanent TSB said it would not “throw away scarce capital to customers in arrears regardless of their actual circumstances” but would focus on working with them “to find sustainable solutions”.

Bank of Ireland and AIB public interest directors admitted they have had no formal contacts with either the Minister for Finance, the Department of Finance or the Central Bank since taking up their posts in 2009 and 2010.

Michael Somers, who joined AIB’s board in 2010, said he was “taken aback” at the risk assessment culture inside the bank. He said only loans above €750 million went to the board for approval at the height of the boom, so lax were the risk protocols.

Fighting may have shaped evolution of human hand

   

Professional boxers are among the ultimate practitioners of an activity that may have shaped human history, Fighting may have shaped the evolution of the human hand, according to a new study by a US team.

The University of Utah researchers used instruments to measure the forces and acceleration when martial artists hit a punch bag.

They found that the structure of the fist provides support that increases the ability of the knuckles to transmit “punching” force.

There may be only one set of skeletal proportions that allows the hand to function both as a mechanism for precise manipulation and as a club for striking”

“We were surprised because the fist strikes were not more forceful than the strikes with the palm. In terms of the work on the bag there is really no difference.”

Of course, the surface that strikes the target with a fist is smaller, so there is more stress from a fist strike.

“The force per area is higher in a fist strike and that is what causes localised tissue damage,” said Prof Carrier.

“There is a performance advantage in that regard. But the real focus of the study was whether the proportions of the human hand allow buttressing (support).”

The team found that making a clenched fist did indeed provide protective buttressing for the delicate bones of the hand. Making a fist increased the stiffness of the second meta-carpo-phalangeal, or MCP, joint (these joints are the knuckles visible when the hand is clenched as a fist) by a factor of four.

It also doubled the ability of the proximal phalanges (the bones of the fingers that articulate with the MCP joints) to transmit a punching force.

Dual use

In their paper, Prof Carrier and Michael H Morgan from the University of Utah’s school of medicine, point out that the human hand has also been shaped by the need for manual dexterity. But they say that a number of different hand proportions are compatible with an enhanced ability to manipulate objects.

  The bones of the hand line up into a strong, buttressed structure in a fist

“There may, however, be only one set of skeletal proportions that allows the hand to function both as a mechanism for precise manipulation and as a club for striking,” the researchers write.

“Ultimately, the evolutionary significance of the human hand may lie in its remarkable ability to serve two seemingly incompatible, but intrinsically human, functions.”

Our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos do not generally form fists, and the researchers think they are unable to: when a chimp curls up its fingers it forms a doughnut shape.

Prof Carrier commented: “The question for me is ‘why wasn’t this discussed 30, 40 years ago.’ As far as I know it isn’t in the literature.”

Asked whether the idea that aggression may have played a key role in shaping the human body might previously have been unpalatable to researchers, Prof Carrier explained: “I think we’re more in that situation now than we were in the past.

“I think there is a lot of resistance, maybe more so among academics than people in general – resistance to the idea that, at some level humans are by nature aggressive animals. I actually think that attitude, and the people who have tried to make the case that we don’t have a nature – those people have not served us well.

“I think we would be better off if we faced the reality that we have these strong emotions and sometimes they prime us to behave in violent ways. I think if we acknowledged that we’d be better able to prevent violence in future.”