Anglo loans - has Shane Ross ever criticized Irish Nationwide?

Mortgagor

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Hello,

Just heard on the Pat Kenny show that our beloved INBS was the institution that facilitated Sean Fitzpatrick's temporary transfer of loans from Anglo-Irish Bank at the end of each year for the last 7 (or whatever it was) years. As if the INBS stock wasn't low enough already (I mean this metaphorically, I know there is no such a thing as a shareholder in INBS etc etc) ...

Share Ross was on the programme and was very guarded, as usual, in his comments about Irish Nationwide. Does anybody recall him ever criticising them?

INBSMember.
 
Re: Irish Nationwide Facilitated Fitzpatrick Loans

Share Ross was on the programme and was very guarded, as usual, in his comments about Irish Nationwide. Does anybody recall him ever criticising them?

Exactly 3 months ago he took as swing at the Regulator, Anglo, and INBS .
 
Re: Irish Nationwide Facilitated Fitzpatrick Loans

I don't consider the following a "swing"

Anglo and Nationwide have the same problems as all the Irish banks. They all overlent to real property "speculators".

He has never criticized the Irish Nationwide.

He has never criticized the fact that this financial institution is dominated by one person.

In fact, this consumer champion has attacked the people who raised the lending practices of the Irish Nationwide at the AGM.

I have never seen him carry any of the stories of overcharging by the Irish Nationwide or any of the Ombudsman's findings against them.

When Reuters(?) carried the story about the Irish Nationwide being in talks with their bankers, Shane Ross went on the radio to defend the Irish Nationwide as the best capitalized of the Irish financial institutions.
 
Re: Irish Nationwide Facilitated Fitzpatrick Loans

Here is a classic from Shane Ross in April 2003

Fingleton's little people savage rebels

Sunday April 27 2003
'YOU should have a prostate job," advised Charlie, the uniformed commissionaire at the Burlington Hotel, Dublin 4, unhelpfully. I had just surfaced from the tedious AGM of Irish Nationwide, visibly drained. Charlie asked me how the meeting had gone. I muttered a few words about how tediously tiring the skirmish had been.

His cheerful solution for my exhaustion was "a prostate job just like Alan Greenspan". A bit extreme for AGM fatigue, but Charlie himself had recently volunteered for one and started to regale me with the finer details of his consequent bodily revival.

Not very welcome advice to a flagging 53-year-old; but far more practical than most of the embarrassing nonsense spoken by Brendan Burgess and others of his gang at the Irish Nationwide meeting, billed as the exit of the society's boss, Michael Fingleton.

After the flop last Thursday, the deflated rebels should top up with Viagra as a reinforcement, or opt for Charlie's prostate job.

The meeting ended in triumph for the man branded an autocrat. The extent of the boss's victory - five to one on a motion of confidence - was stunning, considering all the bad publicity and tales of woe peddled about him.

Yet the outcome was puzzling. How could a group of malcontents emerge so badly scarred from a members' meeting?

The trouble with the rebels was that they were profiteers posing as philanthropists. The rebels want the loot.
Today.

Their determination to hasten the sale of the society forced them to parade trophy victims at the AGM. Every hard luck story was told. Members who had not repaid their loans were wheeled out as victims, not defaulters. They lambasted Fingleton for behaving like a businessman, not a benefactor.
Simultaneously they wanted a share flotation, the proceeds of his success, in the form of a €7,000 payout per member. The lads were invoking Vincent de Paul to enrich themselves. Not a bad trick, if you can get away with it.

But Burgess's gang didn't. This was no meeting dominated by fatcat bankers with millions of proxies. It was the little man and little woman's day out. Every borrower and lender had one vote. And the little people turned against the rebels despite all the pre-AGM hype.

Fingleton's stewardship can be criticised.
Sure, he needs more heavyweights on the board. Sure, he has been overzealous in his pursuit of defaulters.
Sure, he earns an awful lot of money (€835,000). Sure he has been less than transparent.
But Fingleton, for all his faults, has delivered the only thing that matters in business: profit.

The rebels desperately needed losses as ammunition to fire at their target. At the same time they wanted profit to line their pockets.
There were two turning points in the meeting.

The first was when independent director Con Power spoke up for Fingleton. Con Power - who, when he was a member of Albert Reynolds's kitchen cabinet, was sometimes wittily dubbed as 'all con and no power' - dismissed Burgess's claim that there was an untoward error in the accounts.
Power, an accountant , convincingly reassured the little people in the audience that a €9 million adjustment in the profit and loss account was not due to an error, but was merely a timing matter. The society had prudently provided too much for bad debts in the past, incurring a tax liability in later years.
The board was suddenly revealed as having an articulate voice, a man equipped to take on Fingleton, the guy dubbed a dictator, if necessary.

Where were the promised stuffed dummies on the five man board? Michael Walsh, the chairman, was skilful. Dermot Desmond's right-hand man allowed the rebels to drone on for hours, eventually boring the audience to anger.

As Burgess rose to raise yet another tedious point - after three-and-a-half hours of tedium already - the second key moment occurred.
One of the little people rose to his feet and turned on him. To loud applause he accused the leader of the dissidents of a "filibuster". At that moment the game was up and it was all downhill for a rebellion without a cause.

Instinctively, many of us go to AGMs with a sympathy for the voices from the floor. In the case of Eircom, First Active, Smurfits and the big banks, the top table was enriching itself while small shareholders were losing vast sums of money. The big battalions were scratching each others' backs, casting millions of pensioners' votes in favour of their chums on the podium. In the Eircom shareholder rebellion, the 4,000 small shareholders in the hall were almost unanimously against the board. In the Nationwide's case, on Thursday, the average member soon saw the rebels as a threat to their society's continued success. Fingleton, despite all his abrasiveness, was delivering small riches to them.

'After the flop last Thursday, the deflated rebels should top up with Viagra as a reinforcement, or opt for Charlie's prostate job'

In the only show-of-hands vote at the meeting the board won by an overwhelming number.

The punters knew that Fingleton's salary was too high. But they also knew that figures produced by the Nationwide under his leadership are staggering.
When he took over in 1972, profits were €44,000. Today they are €97 million. Assets were €5.5 million. Today they are €5.5 billion. The cost-to-income ratio was 53 per cent. Today it is 22 per cent. Reserves have risen from €210,000 to €4.3 billion. Branches are up from one to 50. Staff have jumped from seven to 400.

Hardly a good case for dismissal.

Next year, profits are set to rise to €100 million for the first time. Next year, legislation is due to allow Fingleton to sell the society to a big bank.
If that happens, every qualifying member will reap a reward of maybe as much as €7,000.

It was a classic example of how not to challenge a board of directors. Real reforms had already been conceded. The wrong target was now being picked at the wrong time. As the meeting progressed, the punters turned against the rebels.
They had blown it.
 
Ok, more a minor jab than a swing.

It sounds like I'm at a disadvantage here.

He even seemed to defend INBS over the . There's no doubt that he doesn't like the regulator at least.
 
It is clear that Michael Fingleton has significant (if presumably informal) influence over, and connections with, the senior editorial management of the Sunday Independent.
 
whatever problems EBS has, I dont think they compare to the state of INBS- the fact that Ross clearly have some death wish against EBS due to his reporting on them almost every Sunday- its quite obvious he is connected in some way to the shower in INBS, as he overlooks chance after chance to splash them on the back page of the business section
 
INBS had a reputation of providing mortgages to journalists and politicians in their heyday.

That is true, but it has not stopped any other journalist from reporting on the Irish Nationwide.

This cannot be the reason why Shane Ross praises them and refused to criticize them.

Brendan
 
is there any history between Shane Ross and EBS??? agree with previous posts, he keeps harping on about the EBS and their subsidiary Haven...there are far bigger issues to tackle yet he continues to bore me with his personal agenda against EBS
btw...what is going to happen with IL&P, INBS, EBS and Haven???
 
INBS is conspicuous by its absence in yet another article from Senator Ross where he makes a 'call to action' to bank shareholders for the upcoming AGM season. Will the Senator be attending the INBS AGM, do you reckon?
 
The Independent group has never spared the Irish Nationwide. The main journalist to highlight their lending practices was Bill Tyson when the was the Personal Finance Editor of the Indo.

That is good to see criticism in the Sindo.

Brendan
 
Over the last few weeks Senator Shane Ross has pontificated on the ills of Anglo and the other banks (AIB, BOI, IL&P etc) yet he has not even commented that most dysfunctional and news worthy bank "Irish Nationwide".
 
It will be interesting to note if Senator Shane Ross (Business Editor with the Sunday Independent) will comment on Mr Fingleton's outrageous bonus accepted after the government bail out.
 
Well. Shane Ross is on Prime Time right now. He thinks Fingleton should resign. He believes Fingleton's bonus is "utterly unacceptable." Does that count as criticism?
 
That was brilliant. Well done Prime Time.

Shane Ross sat quietly and said nothing about the Irish Nationwide. He launched into a tirade of abuse about the EBS and the Bank of Ireland and their upcoming AGMs. He tried hard to muddy the waters and avoid the Irish Nationwide.

He allowed Joan Burton speak about the Irish Nationwide.

Mark Little turned to Shane Ross and said:

"Shane Ross. Dan Boyle said today Michael Fingleton has come to personify all that is wrong with Irish Banking"

Shane Ross: "What we are seeing here...what we are confusing all the time..."misdeameanours and behaving unethically" ...and on the other side ...a raft of bankers who are being paid too much who should all go"



Then Little asked him straight out "Should Fingleton resign?" Ross said " Yes, of course.They should all resign"

Then he asked him"Should he give back the bonus" and Ross had nowhere to go but replied that he should that €1m was an unreal payment.

Great to see it.
 
I seem to be missing the point here. Shane Ross never criticizes Irish Nationwide/Fingleton and you guys seem to be implying something in that but I don't see it. Is Shane Ross friends with Fingleton, is that it?
 
Hi Bronte

We are pointing out nothing further than up to last night, Shane Ross had never criticized the Irish Nationwide or Michael Fingleton. In fact, he has proactively defended them. And he has attacked those of us who spoke up on behalf of the borrowers.

This is completely at odds with his attacks on every other institution.

I don't know the reason for this. I would love to know.

Rainyday implied that it might have something to do with advertising, but that is not the reason.

Brendan
 
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