Irish, English & New York Lawyer | Irish Banking Inquiry Whistleblower | UK & Irish Swap / CFD & Mortgage Frauds | Anti-Corruption

Dublin City, Ireland
Steve is correct. 🔹The UK side of this should never have been a “mis-selling review.” It should be described as “the containment exercise”. Albeit a rather botched one. 🔹Victims paid the price while questionable advisers collected. That is the British half. 🔹The Irish half is worse, because there was never even a pretence of any independent redress scheme. Nothing. 🔹Thousands of SMEs North and South were destroyed by the same mechanism: interest-rate swaps and fixed-rate loans with: -swap-style credit lines -booked in the customer’s name -without adequate disclosure -without consent, and crucially -without the documentation that would have made the product a genuine hedge. 🔹When rates collapsed (manipulated downward by a bank cartel) those hidden lines inflated LTVs, triggered GRG/GRGI transfers, personal guarantees and asset sales. 🔹Ulster Bank customers who had never transacted in sterling found GBP swap liabilities sitting against them. That is not a product defect. That is fraudulent accounting using the banks’ customer as “booking vehicles”. 🔹The official Irish answer was the Mason Hayes & Curran report of December 2014. 🔹Ulster Bank commissioned its own lawyers. The terms of reference excluded the very period in which the swaps were sold. 🔹Of 2,141 businesses put into GRG Ireland, MHC reviewed a handful of files and interviewed five (?) customers. 🔹A senior Ulster Bank insider had already told the Oireachtas that GRG was about “putting businesses to the wall.” 🔹Apparently, fewer than 100 ever returned to mainstream banking. I have yet to identify any and why they may have received different treatment. 🔹Andrew Blair then sat before the Finance Committee and called that report a “clean bill of health.” 🔹On a cursory review, it does not stand up to any level of scrutiny, giving the impression that zero customers were entered into swap arrangements. 🔹Derville Rowland and the Central Bank let it stand..while security reviews conducted by @MHCLawyers have swaps all over them. 🔹The Banking Inquiry itself was already drowning in redactions with the regulator withholding documents that would shed light on the true position of the banks. 🔹I was inside that Inquiry. With my colleagues, we noted the signals of control by vested interests. I wrote up an extensive report. 🔹I was then targeted for saying so. 🔹So in Ireland, we have the scandal of no redress. 🔹Ulster Bank apparently refunded GRG charges to seventeen SMEs. Seventeen. 🔹Confidential settlements (Agar and others) were used to close cases before a court could examine the files. I have examined several. Fraud 101. 🔹Meanwhile the same bank still places pleadings before the Irish High Court describing these arrangements as simply “fixing the rate,” as if no derivative existed, while simultaneously denying any duty to explain derivatives. 🔹Vast sections of the contracts were never there. 🔹No suitability assessment, 🔹No worked examples of break costs, 🔹No explanation of mark-to-market or credit-line impact, 🔹No customer authority for this hidden extra facility. 🔹You cannot “mis-sell” a product whose material terms were never in the file. That is not sloppy sales. 🔹That is deceitfully constructing obligations about which the customer is wholly ignorant. 🔹Steve’s point about the widow in Wales has an Irish twin in every county. 🔹Families who never missed a payment watched the bank enforce against them built on a credit line they were never shown. 🔹MHC excluded the sales period & the courts have been invited to treat fraud as “rate fixing”. This is the same playbook on both sides of the Irish Sea with certain Irish judges having disgracefully performed a “judicial rescue service” for British banks in a tag team with “top” law firms. 🔹The dogs in the street already know & the only people still pretending this was “mis-selling” are the people who need it to be.
Below is my email to @APPGbanking on 23 May 2019 when they 'fixed' their broken link on their website so I could finally see who was funding them. I grew suspicious of the APPG in 2014 when the Chair Gueto Bebb, had promised to ask the FCA to meet with me to discuss my concerns over Hidden Credit Lines at a dinner in Wales, just a week later he refused & suggested he had never said that. He had - over 200 people heard him... @efgbricklayer was there & can verify the events. All of the Bully Banks directors were there, most of whom repeatedly told me I was wrong about this as they collected their membership fees and fabricated the names of hundreds of members, to pretend they had 2,000 members. That was the figure @TheFCA had told them they needed - 10% of the victim population to represent them all in negotiations with the FCA, on the IRHP Review - compensation scheme. Bully Banks directors told members they were chasing £30 billion with losses & consequential losses. The dire negotiations led to a paltry £2.2 billion & virtually no consequential losses. @TheFCA made every bank sign an undertaking their Review would comply with the 'Rules', then called all of the Skilled Persons in & replaced the Rules with the 'Sales Standards'. The Standards did not include consideration of the Hidden Credit Lines or their effect, which was to destroy tens of thousands of SMEs, with the undisclosed credit breaching Loan to Values and triggering SRM, GRG & BSU transfers and insolvency. Hidden Credit Lines on @UlsterBankNI & @LloydsBank Fixed Rate Loans were just a major fraud @TheFCA is still desperately trying to cover up despite @jameshurley 4 excellent articles in the Times. The FCA specifically excluded consideration of 'contingent liabilities' and credit lines, the banks lied that the losses were not 'foreseeable' and kept tens of billions stolen from SMEs. At the dinner in Wales, I was representing the widow of a victim, who on the verge of losing his home had taken his life to protect his widow, the bank had enforced a PG based on an undisclosed £190k swap credit line & was going to sell the house to collect its profits from the fraud. At the same time Bully Banks directors were staying in a 2 bed flat in London, with expense cards paid by victims contributions, whilst I and others supported the victim & his wife pro bono because they had no money. Bully Banks choice of lawyers Slater & Gordon wanted £2k on the table before they would even read the file & refused to help. Five years later the APPG allegedly representing swap & Fixed Rate Loan victims, still would not expose the fraud. Victims I explained the Hidden Credit Lines to, approached the Secretariat and then Chair @kevinhollinrake who refused to write to the banks on the matter. The funding I exposed below & the people the APPG were promoting to represent victims, amongst other concerns, led to an MP with integrity @normanlamb step down as Co Chair just as he did from the whistleblowing APPG when @CompassnInCare exposed similar concerns about WBUK. Sir Norman had not been aware of it because rather than disclose it on the Parliament website @NatWestGroup and the other banks paid the money to the Secretariat, who then donated it to the APPG... Was it my exposing the bank funding that led to them blocking me on X, or might it be because I allege that they along with @TheFCA have misled Parliament about this magnitude and effect of this fraud since inception? Or was it my reporting that the APPG's Director of Policy and head of the Secretariat had the benefit of a 3 bed flat in Horseferry for 2 years around this time worth circa £50k pa provided by @SMEAllianceLtd Directors. Or the fact that I raised my concerns that the same directors were then promoted them as stakeholders on the sham BBRS compensation scheme & the @LloydsBank morally bankrupt Foskett Compensation schemes. Or perhaps is it because I reported my concerns that a Parliamentary staffer was failing to declare such a substantial benefit and I have the evidence that the Commons Registrar was misled about the benefit. Bebb got the Tory 'Whip' role after Chairing the APPG, an interesting promotion for someone allegedly taking on banks & @TheFCA but then he never was successful on either front... The @SMEAllianceLtd directors quadrupled their compensation in the Foskett Panel after agreeing new Rules in the Foskett panel that destroyed the compensation rights of many REAL victims. Victims bankrupted because of the fraud then faced the same fate again. The BBRS set up to provide redress to 60,000 victims paid millions out to its Board, peanuts out to about 6 victims then shut down. Controlled at the start by the banks via a hidden membership, it was a sham, a con, promoted by @APPGbanking & @SMEAllianceLtd in conjunction with @UKFtweets Sir David Foskett broke his promises of meeting with any victim, even if they had a Trustee. His team refusing David Morgan's widow a meeting on 5 occasions. Leaving her to fight a fee hungry Trustee, collecting funds for non existent debts & failing to investigate potentially fraudulent proofs of debt. Perhaps its time to stop letting the Banks & FCA pick their usual 'safe pairs of hands', to negotiate with now the largest financial fraud in living memory is going to be exposed. If the Public Inquiry we are demanding leads to the tens of billions of assets stolen from SME's being returned with interest, possibly the largest boost to the economy & Revenue available, then those same bad actors must be nowhere near any discussions or negotiations. This time the benefits and compensation should be for the victims not the pseudo advisers. @appgonifandffs @johnmcdonnellMP @andyburnham @labourlewis @IanByrneMP @NeilForPoole @Steffanaquarone @mpsusanmurray @andyverity @BankConfidenti1 @Nat_Worst @james_glanville @mickmor16921994 @ArturNadol7566 @TransparencyTF @EmilyBuchanan1 @bleating_lamb @BomberMorgan @CarshaltonArt @johncock_wayne @MLorrM @JohnPKidd
1
32
43
2,276
Quinn / Anglo 🔹Seán Quinn’s CFD company had no bank account, sat in his children’s names, and apparently still got to trade with Bear Stearns in London. 🔹That’s Bazzely V. Madeira. 🔹Set up in 2005. 🔹Five adult children on the share register. 🔹Father running the book. 🔹Quinn staff moving the cash. 🔹Nine CFD providers. 🔹Let’s say one of them was BSIL — Bear Stearns International Limited. I’m trying to work out what a London CFD desk actually had to do to get comfortable with that, before MiFID and after. Not the newspaper version. The onboarding version. 🔹If you sat on compliance, credit or onboarding in London around then, these are the questions:
1
3
12
478
♻️Before 1 November 2007♻️ 🔹Who was the client — the Madeira company, the five children, or Seán? 🔹Did you treat it as a private customer, or opt it up to intermediate customer? 🔹If you opted it up, whose knowledge of CFDs did you test? 🔹The company’s? Brenda’s? His? 🔹Who got the written warning that protections were being dropped — and who signed it? 🔹How do you give a private-customer CFD risk warning to a company that doesn’t have a bank account? 🔹What authority to trade leveraged derivatives was on the file — a proper resolution, or just “it’s the Quinns”? 🔹How did beneficial ownership work when the children owned it on paper and the father called every shot? 🔹And the bit I can’t get past: every margin payment coming from someone else’s account. 🔹Who signed that off? 🔹A shrug, or an MLRO? 🔹Did anyone notice the same name sitting at nine CFD houses?
1
1
6
128
3/ ♻️From 1 November 2007 to March 2008♻️ 🔹When the new rules switched on, what did Bazzely become — retail, per se professional, or elective professional? 🔹It wasn’t a large company under the size tests. So if it wasn’t retail, what was the paper? 🔹If you went elective professional, who passed the qualitative test? 🔹Which two quantitative tests did the client meet? The company had no cash account, so I’m struggling to see a €500k portfolio unless you counted the family. 🔹Where is the written request and the “you will lose these protections” acknowledgement? 🔹CFDs are complex. If it stayed retail, where is the appropriateness test — and which person did you assess? 🔹After the 2007 money-laundering rules, you’re still taking third-party payments. 🔹What did monitoring look like? 🔹When the book went almost all-Anglo and the margin calls exploded, did anyone reopen the file? 🔹By March 2008 the name is still on Bear’s OTC payments list against BSIL. What was the live classification that week? 🔹I’m not saying it couldn’t be done. I’m saying if it was done properly, there should be a very fat file. “Wealthy Irish family, corporate CFD account, standard terms” is a vibe. It isn’t a process. 🔹So — anyone who was there. 🔹What did BSIL actually do? @Wftproof
1
4
120
Lorraine Morris retweeted
“Consumenten moeten erop kunnen rekenen dat bankmedewerkers integer handelen. Momenteel is de werking van het tuchtrecht maar zeer gering, omdat banken vrijwel alleen maar eenvoudige zaken melden aan de STB.” Goh, echt? 👇 🧵 nu.nl/economie/6410963/stich…
De algemeen directeur Stichting Tuchtecht Banken @TRB_nl heeft na 3 (!!) jaar ‘n ei gelegd. Hij staakt het onderzoek mbt de (>200) tuchtklachten die zijn gedaan nav vd witwasschikking van €775 miljoen tussen de Staat en ING. De klachten worden dus niet in behandeling genomen.1/
6
38
92
2,937
‼️This is ghastly‼️ 🔹Older people paid more, year after year, for one simple promise: if their hip or knee went, they would not be left with an outlandish bill. 🔹However, insurers have now hiked the premium and gutted that same cover. 🔹So you can spend a lifetime keeping the policy going, then discover at 70 that a hip replacement leaves you €6,000 short, on a plan that just got more expensive. 🔹That is not a market adjustment. It is bait-and-switch aimed at the people least able to shop around, least able to wait on a public list, and most likely to need the surgery. 🔹The insurance companies sold “peace of mind” and now like most institutions, they are delivering up “a shortfall”. independent.ie/irish-news/he…
3
35
92
1,806
Quinn / Anglo 🔹The sentence below on p 161 of Trevor Birney’s book on Quinn literally stopped me in my tracks. 🔹Being a derivatives lawyer and CFDs effectively working like cash settled equity swaps, I went straight to CFDs in the index and was directed to what is 🔹a bold reference to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) banning CFDs in the United States “because of their high risk”. 🔹This is simply not an accurate account of what the SEC did & I question the motivation of the author for stating it. 🔹My previous letter to the @IrishTimes refers - regarding the contrast between labelling Ken Dart, user of CFDs as “the investor” yet Sean Quinn, user of CFDs as “the gambler”- 🔹Birney by inserting this inaccurate & misleading statement, subtly adds to this framing of Quinn as the gambler - just like @IrishTimes. And in doing so, he has opened up a very large can of worms around matters such as 🔹the eligibility of the Bazzely entity to contract CFDs at all & 🔹what tests were conducted by each of the CFD providers to ensure that this entity qualified to trade in CFDs. I will make what should surely be a reasonable assumption: that the extensive legal teams involved in the Quinn litigation - and, where relevant, the courts dealing with these transactions - will have examined 🔹the precise legal identity and location of each CFD provider, 🔹the regulatory / client classification regime applicable to it, and 🔹the precise basis upon which Bazzely was classified and accepted as a client/counterparty. If the index is correct, I’m not certain this got the airtime it should have warranted. @Wftproof @stevemiddi1 @JoeBrennan10 @JohnEdwardLee
2
7
15
484
Thanks to the wonderful follower who sent me Trevor Birney’s Quinn👇. 🔹I have only just received it, so this is emphatically a first impression, not a review. 🔹But, naturally, I went straight to the index. 🔹What I found - or rather, didn’t find - surprised me, but perhaps it shouldn’t have - given Quinn’s own recent commentary on Birney. 🔹There appears to be no reference at all to Mr Justice Peter Charleton. 🔹That is quite an omission given what Charleton J actually decided in 2012. 🔹On a preliminary issue, he permitted the Quinn family to advance their case concerning alleged illegality surrounding Anglo’s lending. 🔹He referred to the “flagrant illegality” alleged and observed that, if financial transactions could properly be described as “horrific”, that description would apply to the allegations before him.
1
7
21
637
3/ Whatever one’s view of that reasoning, consider the sequence: 🔹Charleton J: the alleged illegality can be litigated. 🔹Fanning SC: Anglo’s alleged conduct described in court as “grotesquely illegal”. 🔹Supreme Court: underlying lending contracts nevertheless held enforceable notwithstanding illegality. 🔹That isn’t peripheral to the Quinn story. It is part of the story. 🔹Ms Justice Elizabeth Dunne does, however, appear in the index, including in connection with the imprisonment of members of the Quinn family. 🔹Perhaps it is simply a faulty or unusually selective index. I am entirely willing to give the author that benefit of the doubt. I have barely started reading.
3
1
1
83
4/ I then found a reference to Matthew Elderfield (Financial Regulator) in the index and, given my particular interest in the regulatory history (Banking Inquiry regulatory etc), immediately turned to those pages and glanced through them. 🔹They include the extraordinary episode in which Quinn Insurance Limited was taken out of the Quinn family’s control following the regulator’s ex parte application for the appointment of provisional administrators in March 2010. 🔹On that first glance, however, I cannot see any meaningful exploration of what seem to me to be obvious questions about Elderfield’s own background, relationships and potential conflicts of interest, or what was disclosed concerning them. 🔹I stress again: I have only glanced at these pages. I may find that analysis elsewhere in the book as I read it properly. 🔹But these are precisely the questions I would expect investigative reporting to pursue: 🔹What was the precise evidential basis for that exceptional intervention? 🔹What exactly was put before the court at the ex parte stage? 🔹What wasn’t? 🔹Was Anglo’s true financial position on lending to Quinn disclosed? 🔹What institutional relationships surrounded the decision? 🔹And were there relationships or potential conflicts involving the decision-makers that warranted disclosure or investigation? 🔹Which brings me to the endorsement on the cover: “A compelling blend of investigative reporting and psychological profile.” Perhaps. I will keep reading. 🔹But my immediate question is whether this is principally an investigation of Seán Quinn, rather than an investigation of what happened to Seán Quinn and the institutional machinery surrounding it. 🔹Those are very different exercises. 🔹Because surely the complete story cannot stop with the businessman. 🔹It has to follow the evidence through Anglo, the regulator, the legal profession and the courts - including the remarkable legal history surrounding loans alleged to have been illegal and their subsequent enforceability. 🔹The real test of investigative journalism is not simply how deeply it investigates its subject. It is whether it applies the same curiosity to every powerful institution surrounding him. @Wftproof @ArturNadol7566 @alomohan @JMcGuinnessTD
2
3
93
👇👇👇 🔹We are being sold a reassuring story: 🔹credit unions passing €1bn in mortgage lending, community values, member ownership, local lending and a welcome alternative to the banks. 🔹But follow the architecture and the messaging becomes considerably more complicated. 🔹Credit unions are simultaneously building a centralised treasury structure designed to access alternative and longer-term sources of funding.
🔹 If you’re hunting for a mortgage, read my thread tomorrow before assuming a credit-union mortgage is simply a local, member-owned alternative to the banks. @IrishTimes, this is precisely where I become exasperated by what remains “unsaid”. @JoeBrennan10 Mortgage lending at credit unions tops €1bn irishtimes.com/business/2026…
2
16
31
1,149
5/ 🔹The central question is simple: 🔹Does the borrower remain in a genuinely local, member-focused relationship, or could the economic interest in the mortgage ultimately sit elsewhere? I’m not certain that they will. 🔹There are other mixed messages. 🔹CU Mortgage Services says the product is provided by regulated participating credit unions and that ‼️MSDAC itself is not Central Bank regulated.‼️ 🔹Yet publicly available versions of its standard mortgage conditions appear to contain template wording describing “CU Mortgage Services” as regulated and even as “a credit union”, alongside what appears to be a placeholder company number. 🔹Then look at the personnel being assembled around this transformation: substantial backgrounds in conventional banking, treasury, mortgage portfolio management and loan portfolio sales.
1
46
6/ 🔹This demands scrutiny. 🔹Ireland has surely learned by now that the interesting part of a financial-services story is rarely the headline lending number. 🔹It is who ultimately funds the loans, what return those funders require, who can acquire an interest in them, what sits behind the balance sheet, how those economics affect the borrower, and what the borrower was actually told. 🔹€1bn of credit-union mortgages is a story - however the architecture being constructed behind that €1bn may be the much bigger one. @kenoflynnTD @JMcGuinnessTD
1
49
🔹 If you’re hunting for a mortgage, read my thread tomorrow before assuming a credit-union mortgage is simply a local, member-owned alternative to the banks. @IrishTimes, this is precisely where I become exasperated by what remains “unsaid”. @JoeBrennan10 Mortgage lending at credit unions tops €1bn irishtimes.com/business/2026…
9
17
1,371
Lorraine Morris retweeted
@MHCLawyers produced the unreliable “clean bill of health” report here - in which terms of reference excluded periods during which customers were duped by “sales” of said swaps. Leading firms enforced on behalf of Ulster Bank through courts & were successful despite the flawed documentary record showing no valid debt.
3
3
145
There appear to be many missing bridges in the testimony of certain individuals at the @OireachtasNews Banking Inquiry. 🔹Boucher's “quite a lot of eligible collateral” - what did that prove? 🔹he told the Inquiry that @talktoBOI did not feel it needed a guarantee in its own right on 29 September and referred to the bank having “very significant collateral” including a large mortgage asset base and “quite a lot of eligible collateral”. • Eligible at what value and under which eligibility rules? • How much was unencumbered? • How much was already pre-positioned and operationally available? • What haircut applied? • How much cash did it produce, rather than how much collateral existed? • Was the statement about the proportion of BOI assets represented by mortgages evidence of liquidity, or evidence of a large pool of assets potentially capable of being transformed into liquidity? Someone else - apparently now viewed as hoodwinking by our Finance Committee - called these “self-funding assets”. • If the latter, was anyone at the Inquiry able to sufficiently distinguish “asset abundance” from “cash availability” not to mention the significance of the deemed valuation dates in or around the guarantee date for starters? @Wftproof @ArturNadol7566
7
14
335
Lorraine Morris retweeted
🔹It is worth mentioning that when Mr Justice Garrett Simons was subjected to criticism, the judicial and legal establishment came forward publicly to defend judicial independence and his integrity. 🔹Quite properly. 🔹Yet I have now raised over many years detailed and serious questions concerning Mr Justice Senan Allen’s conduct before his judicial appointment, arising from his “review” of my protected disclosures at the Banking Inquiry. 🔹Where is the equivalent defence of Senan Allen from his colleagues? 🔹Not one single substantive statement had answered these serious allegations. 🔹Not one explanation of the investigative decisions I have challenged. 🔹Not one attempt to demonstrate, by reference to the underlying evidence, that the Allen Review was sound. 🔹Perhaps there is a practical difficulty. I hold the official transcripts of my interviews with Allen in which he declined to review serious disclosures. 🔹Press releases claim that he did. 🔹The transcripts provide an evidential record against which his subsequent report and his investigative choices can be tested. 🔹I provided the rebuttal, yet the Banking Inquiry report issued anyway. It contained much misleading testimony. 🔹I have also subsequently examined numerous bank-enforcement files which raise profoundly troubling questions about how Ulster Bank debts and documentation were presented to and enforced through the Irish courts against borrowers who were fundamentally deceived by swaps offered as “protection”. @stevemiddi1 @BankConfidenti1 @TransparencyTF 🔹Those cases deserve independent examination on their own evidence; the role of judges in them (and Allen is certainly not alone and there are live ongoing cases of enforcement against invalid debts) should not be insulated from legitimate scrutiny simply because the decisions were judicial ones. 🔹And there is a public-interest dimension that cannot simply be allowed to drift away with time. 🔹Mr Justice Allen holds public office and, ultimately, the public will fund the pension attaching to that office. 🔹If serious, evidenced questions about the conduct of a serving judge are capable of being answered, they should be answered while accountability remains possible and not left uncontested until retirement turns the entire affair into another historical controversy. 🔹Judicial independence matters enormously. But independence from political interference is not immunity from evidence-based scrutiny. 🔹If my evidence is wrong, rebut it. 🔹If the Allen Review was sound, demonstrate it. 🔹Silence answers neither question. @Wftproof @WinkSabee @kenoflynnTD @JMcGuinnessTD @OCallaghanJim @HMcEntee @MaryLouMcDonald @PearseDoherty @Farrell_Mairead @SamanthaLaDuc @jackfchambers @BarryLenihan @UcdOf24713 @tcddublin @TCDLawSchool
🔹The questions that have arisen for Mr Justice Senan Allen are deeply uncomfortable ones. 🔹Why would he, as a reviewer appointed to examine serious public-interest concerns choose not to examine matters capable of testing them objectively? 🔹What was Allen’s reason for narrowing his inquiry into my protected disclosures in that way? 🔹Why did Allen refuse to delve into the matter of conflicts of interest, excessively withheld & redacted documentation? 🔹What institutional interest, if any, was served by shifting attention from evidence to the person raising it? 🔹Who benefited from that shift and is still benefiting? 🔹When Frank Browne of the Central Bank essentially corroborated my disclosure post the publication of the Allen Report, why did Allen refuse to come forward? 🔹And perhaps the most important question: why has the integrity of the Allen review not yet itself been subjected to genuinely independent scrutiny? 🔹Ultimately, Allen’s credibility as reviewer must be tested not simply by what he wrote, but by what he chose not to investigate and his reasons for not doing so. 🔹That Allen has adjudicated in bank related cases since 2018 as a Superior Court judge - with such a marked credibility issue publicly stated against him - will eventually be viewed as another scandal for @DeptJusticeIRL - as they have been put on notice by me of his role in the Ulster Bank Hidden Credit Line Scandal. 🔹The bank’s criminal conduct needed & continues to require assistance by law firms & judges operating the “judicial rescue service”. @Wftproof @stevemiddi1 @PearseDoherty @JMcGuinnessTD @kenoflynnTD
10
15
678