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E-mailIrish stockbrokers made illegal trade
Published Saturday, March 28, 2009, 3:11 PM
Updated Thursday, July 23, 2009, 5:29 PM
Goodbody Stockbrokers broke the law when trading an Irish bank's shares
Photo by Graham Hughes/Photocall Ireland
An Irish stockbrokers broke the law when it traded shares of an Irish bank in 2001, the Irish Financial Regulator has said.
The regulator added that Dublin-based Goodbody Stockbrokers had to make “significant personnel changes” because of the illegal trading of Allied Irish Bank shares.
IrishCentral undertands that the New York Times is currently carrying out an investigation into an alleged insider trading scandal in Ireland.
It has also been revealed this week that Allied Irish Bank, which was bailed out by the Irish government, lost over $80 million in a property scam in Britain.
The scam is currently being investigated by Britain’s Serious Fraud Office.
This week, Eugene McErlean, a former auditor with the bank, told the Irish parliament’s Joint Committee on Economic Regulatory Affairs that a Goodbody scheme used tax havens in the Pacific and the Caribbean to operate the scheme.
The Financial Regulator, responding to McErlean’s claims, said that the scheme “had not operated in accordance” with agreements between the Irish Central Bank and the Irish Stock Exchange, the state bodies that permitted Goodbody to trade in the bank’s shares.
Meanwhile, a number of major lawsuits are expected to be filed in the wake of the British property scam that left the state-guaranteed bank with millions of Euros of loses.
Guarantees given to the bank for loans were overstated by millions – creating further questions about the embattled Irish banking systems’ lending procedures.
The bank tried to keep details of the scam quiet – its 2008 results recorded the lose in a footnote.
Britain’s Serious Fraud Squad, which has had a team of 20 investigators working on the case since late last year, have identified one man thought to be behind the scam, and carried out a number of raids in London on Wednesday.
It is thought that the suspect gave Allied Irish Bank faked documents to show that higher rents and longer leases were being paid on properties in his portfolio than was actually the case. This enabled him to borrow more money from the bank that the properties were worth.
News of the scam saw the banks shares drop 10 percent in trading on Thursday, before rebounding to finish down 1.5 percent.
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