Eddie Hobbs and Tony Taylor

B

Bank Manager

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I really look forward to Eddie presenting the Rip Off programme on Taylor Investments ripping off the likes of St V de P. Should be a good one given that he was Tony Taylors partner, we might even get the inside story!
 
Re: Rip Off Ireland - Reviews

Bank Manager said:
I really look forward to Eddie presenting the Rip Off programme on Taylor Investments ripping off the likes of St V de P. Should be a good one given that he was Tony Taylors partner, we might even get the inside story!
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You forgot to mention the bit about how Eddie funded the private detective that found Tony in the UK and ensured he was brought back here to face the music.
 
Re: Rip Off Ireland - Reviews

RainyDay said:
You forgot to mention the bit about how Eddie funded the private detective that found Tony in the UK and ensured he was brought back here to face the music.
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Guilty conscience???
 
Re: Rip Off Ireland - Reviews

RainyDay said:
Cheap shot from an anonymous poster against a named individual.
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Well that's rich. Here's a guy claiming to be the great white knight for the 'consumer', I for one (and many others I know) have our doubts....... If he wasn't involved with TT why not include it in the programme, as an example of what a real 'rip off' can look like, rather than he having cheap shots at Govt and Businesses in Ireland, while attempting to appeal to popular opinion. Didn;t see the programme, but I'm intrigued to know what sending nappies to a minister is supposed to achieve (at least that's what appears to be happening from reading this thread).
 
Re: Rip Off Ireland - Reviews

Bank Manager said:
If he wasn't involved with TT why not include it in the programme, as an example of what a real 'rip off' can look like, rather than he having cheap shots at Govt and Businesses in Ireland, while attempting to appeal to popular opinion.
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I'd imagine there could be all sorts of potential legal issues if he was a partner of this guy regardless of his conduct good or bad. Also how could he be said to be an objective journalist given his own connection to the whole affair. If he did do a show on this I'm sure he would get a slating for having a conflict of interest.
 
Re: Rip Off Ireland - Reviews

Sad to see the great Irish tradition of knocking down anyone who has the guts to stick their head above the parapet alive and well. If you think that the TT issue is worthy of a TV program, get up off your backside, make the TV show and get it shown. If you really, really think that this is something that Eddie should do, give him a call at his office tomorrow and discuss it with him - don't hide behind anonymous postings while taking cheap shots at a named individual.

So let's turn the 'guilt by association' game around for a moment. You're a bank manager right. Look at the 9 bank managers from NIB where the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement has requested their disqualification as directors. Look at all those bank managers from all banks who pushed the bogus non-resident accounts in the 80's & 90's. What a shower of crooks. And you're one of them so you must be a crook - right? You must be a pretty dodgy character - right? Have you stopped beating your wife yet?

So how does it feel to get castigated by association? The key difference of course is that you are still an anonymous poster, whereas Eddie is a professional in the public domain. In case my sarcasm in the last paragraph isn't clear, I'm not serious in these comments. I'm making about about tabloid-journalist style guilt by association comments which have absolutely no foundation. If you have information of any wrongdoing by Eddie, then take it through the proper channels. If you don't have any hard information, then hold your fire.
 
Re: Rip Off Ireland - Reviews

In order to clarify Eddies position is anyone aware of the facts surrounding Eddies history with TT investments. A couple of cynics here in work have made off the cuff remarks about Eddies integrity due to his association with Tony Taylor. Maybe it could be posted on another thread. Personally I don't know enough about it to make judgement & prefer to take Eddie at face value.
BTW this is a request for facts not opinions or rants.!

Thx all,
 
Re: Rip Off Ireland - Reviews

In my opinion, Eddie made one big mistake in this whole issue. As an employee of Taylor Investments, he accepted a directorship without having access to the accounts. He was a director for 18 months up to the date of the fraud. He did sign off accounts during this period, which he should not have done. That was the late 1980's when this was commonplace. He was totally ignorant of what his boss was doing. Like many others, he trusted Tony Taylor. This was not unreasonable. Tony Taylor was a very public figure who had set up the Irish Brokers Association and was very well known and highly regarded. We are less trusting these days.

Taylor fully supported Eddie in his campaign on endowment mortgages so it did look like Taylor was a good guy. When I was campaigning against the demutualisation of the Irish Permanent, I got very little public support. I got a phone call out of the blue from Taylor, whom I had never met, encouraging me. I got great encouragement as this was the only support I got from an industry insider whom I would have had respect for at the time. I can see how Eddie would have trusted and liked the guy.


I gather that most of the fraud involved keeping some customers' accounts at home. The money never ever went through Taylor Investments books, so Eddie would have had great difficulty in knowing that there was a fraud taking place.

According to David Murphy in and Irish Independent report in August 1999:


When he became aware of the problem, he was totally open and honest in his reaction to it. He assisted the authorities proactively in resolving the issues.

Some months later, he was one of the first people, if not the first person, to be appointed as an Authorised Advisor. I think it was the Central Bank who made those appointments, so they were happy with him. That is good enough for me. If the Central Bank had any doubts about Eddie, they would not have allowed him to continue working in the industry.

He used his own funds to locate Tony Taylor.

Just to restate for the record:
The Central Bank granted Eddie Authorized Advisor status.
IFSRA has renewed this each year.
The High Court did not restrict Eddie as a director.
No creditor has taken any action against him
No criminal or civil charges were taken against him
He was appointed by the Minister for Finance to the IFSRA Consumer Panel
He was appointed by the Minister for Entrprise to the Consumer Strategy Group.

His only "guilt" is by association and his detractors have really milked this.
 
Just to clarify a few issues raised earlier on in this thread...

Taylor Investments was a limited company owned by Tony Taylor and his wife Shirley(?). I think there may have been a few companies in the group. Eddie was a director of one or more of these companies. I don't know if he was a shareholder.

He was not a partner of Tony Taylor and this is a critical distinction. In a partnership, all partners are jointly and severally liable for the debts of the partnership. So in the Morrogh's case, the senior partner who did nothing wrong, has lost all his personal wealth due to the fraud by his junior partner. Had Eddie been a partner, he would have been liable for the debts of the company.

Directors are liable for the debts of a company if fraud or reckless trading can be proved against them. To the best of my knowledge, neither the liquidator nor the creditors attempted to prove fraud against Eddie.

Eddie has had a dramatic impact on improving the lot of financial consumers in Ireland. He has highlighted the huge money being made by people in the endowment mortgage business. He was almost singlehandedly responsible for the reduction in endowment mortgages from 40% of the market to virtually zero. Lots of people have saved a lot of money who have never heard of Eddie Hobbs.

There are many insurance companies, banks, and intermediaries who have lost a lot through Eddie's activities. So every so often, they raise the Taylor story to discredit him. It simply doesn't work. They can only use innuendo and cheap shots as the facts simply don't support anything else.

Brendan
 
Thx Brendan. Non-issue as far as I'm concerned now & I'll have no hesitation in outlining your points to the "cynics" in here.

As a sideline I wonder if some reputable journalist out there would spot a story here & interview Eddie. Would be a great way to put an end to the whispers & sniggers about his past with TT investments not to mention a scoop with the new rising star of Irish TV
 
I have read articles in papers over the last couple of weeks (I think it was the Sunday Independent or Tribune) which gave a fairly detailed profile of Eddie Hobbs and discussed his association with Tony Taylor. The general tone was that his behaviour was honourable in his business dealings, and that he upheld as well as obeyed the law. Other than the remarks made on this site, I haven't heard of any negative comments as to his previous relationships.
 
Hi Imperator

Eddie's association with Taylor is raised in a negative manner in the media from time to time. Most notably by the deputy business editor of the Irish Times, John McManus who has written two opinion pieces saying, as far as I remember, that Eddie should not be the financial spokesperson for the Consumers Association.

Here is what a search of the site shows:



1 [broken link removed]
John McManus
Business Opinion: There is an interesting little software company based up in the Guinness Enterprise Centre in Dublin's Liberties called 3Q Solutions. ...
matched words: hobbs taylor mcmanus published: 13/06/2005

[broken link removed]
By JOHN MCMANUS
Eddie Hobbs, the Consumer Association of Ireland spokesman on financial services, is rarely out of the public eye. The launch of his latest brainchild, the association's savermark for the new special ...
matched words: hobbs taylor mcmanus published: 21/05/2001

I wrote a letter to the Irish Times along the above lines, and it was never published.

Brendan
 
Eddie himself wrote a piece in The Examiner a year or two ago openly discussing the various "conflict of interest" allegations against him, and how they really had been done to death and were becoming boring at this stage.

The more time passes, the more boring it becomes when someone tries to resurrect ancient history.
 
Hi cerebros

I think we will wait for Bank Manager to respond to the posts in the thread as he raised it initially.
 
Re: Rip Off Ireland - Reviews

Brendan said:
When I was campaigning against the demutualisation of the Irish Permanent,
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Sorry to go off-topic again, but you campaigned against the demutualisation of the Irish Permanent?

I discovered this site through searches for info on the Irish Nationwide demutualisation which you are campaigning for.

Did your views on demutualisation change over time or do you see the circumstances as different in each case?
 
Interesting responses. The one thing we probably all agree on is that the story is unlikely ever to be included in the Rip-Off programme.
 
I'm really dissapointed that Bank Mananger hasn't the decency to withdraw his comments, particularly the 'guilty conscience?' weasel words. As I've pointed out to him privately this particular suggestion, it is actually quite illogical. Surely if EH had done something wrong, it would in his interest for TT not to be found. The last thing he'd want would be to reopen the Garda investigation and put TT on the stand. If EH had done anything wrong, he'd be praying for TT never to appear in Ireland again.

To me, this is like the worst of Irish small-town oul biddy gossiping. Take the one visible weakness from an individual's history and keep knocking the person down, down and down again. Is 'Interesting responses' really the best you can do?
 
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