Irish, English & New York Lawyer | Irish Banking Inquiry Whistleblower | UK & Irish Swap / CFD & Mortgage Frauds | Anti-Corruption
Dublin City, Ireland
Joined May 2022
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🔹I am deeply honoured to have received an award today from the Transparency Task Force at the House of Commons, Westminster, during the summit
“Why We Must Protect the Wellbeing of Whistleblowers,”
- held in memory of Simon Andriesz & organised by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Investment Fraud and Fairer Financial Services.
🔹My sincere thanks to the Transparency Task Force for this recognition and for its tireless commitment to exposing financial wrongdoing, championing whistleblowers & supporting victims.
🔹I wish to dedicate this award to all victims of banking misconduct and financial fraud, whether through the hidden credit line scandal or mortgage overcharging & abuse - to all those who have lost their homes, businesses, livelihoods, health &, tragically, their lives.
🔹To the families left behind, to those still fighting for justice & to the courageous internal bank whistleblowers who have risked everything to expose wrongdoing: this recognition also belongs to you.
🔹Behind every financial scandal are human beings whose suffering is too often overlooked, while those responsible too frequently escape meaningful accountability.
🔹The protection of powerful financial institutions must never take precedence over the protection of innocent people.
🔹It was particularly poignant to receive this recognition at a gathering honouring Simon Andriesz, whose courage & tragic loss remind us why this work matters so profoundly.
🔹May his memory strengthen our collective determination to expose wrongdoing, protect whistleblowers, support victims and secure justice.
🔹For those we have lost. For those still suffering. And for those who refuse to be silenced.
🔹Thank you to all who have supported me through this difficult journey.
🔹Work together; share evidence; harness the power of AI & ensure those who are exposing fraud & misconduct are not facing the repercussions alone.
🔹 Rest in peace Simon.
@TransparencyTF @johnmcdonnellMP @Wftproof @stevemiddi1 @WinkSabee @BlowersIreland @kenoflynnTD @JMcGuinnessTD @SamanthaLaDuc @CarshaltonArt @efgbricklayer @JulieCo64621732 @alomohan @premnsikka @celticjulie @AnybodyButBerti @NoelMcgree
A note on mediations in debt recovery cases
Mediations can be most harmful when
🔹one party has incomplete information
🔹power disparities are not addressed
🔹advocacy is weak or misaligned with the client’s actual interests
The best defense is
🔹preparation
🔹clear communication with your own lawyer
🔹insistence on the information you need, and
🔹willingness to pause or exit if the process no longer feels protective of your rights
Process failures or ethical breaches can sometimes be raised with
🔹bar associations
🔹courts, or
🔹mediators’ organizations
though outcomes will vary….
🔹An affidavit is a sworn statement of fact.
🔹Knowingly putting false or misleading material before a court is perjury and is professional misconduct for the lawyers involved.
🔹Courts have repeatedly criticised solicitors and barristers who swear or settle affidavits containing hearsay presented as personal knowledge, legal argument dressed up as fact, or material the deponent cannot properly verify.
🔹The duty to the court not to mislead is paramount and overrides any duty to the client. Many lawyers are acting as “hired guns” for regular remuneration.
🔹LinkedIn endorsements are sometimes given without meaningful personal knowledge of the skill being endorsed.
🔹In ordinary commercial networking, that is mostly harmless.
🔹In a regulated profession whose currency is credibility before the courts, it is not.
🔹Multiple public endorsements from other lawyers create a visible network of association.
🔹When a barrister is repeatedly involved in cases where affidavits are later shown to be deficient, misleading, or worse, then those endorsements become part of the public record of who was prepared to vouch for them.
🔹The practical point is therefore straightforward.
🔹Lawyers who care about their own standing have a reason to treat endorsements more carefully than the platform’s design encourages.
🔹An endorsement is a public statement.
🔹If the recipient is later associated with practices that damage confidence in the administration of justice, the endorser is, by definition, on the public record as having associated themselves with that person.
🔹That does not make the endorser responsible for the underlying conduct, but it does make selective silence or selective association a rational professional choice.
🔹Whether multiple affidavits currently before our courts - or indeed historically before our courts - meets the threshold of “questionable” is a matter of evidence in those cases.
🔹The broader professional observation, that public endorsements create association, and association has consequences - is simply accurate.
🔹Review your endorsements.
Are you involved in personal injuries litigation in the High Court in Ireland?
🔹Deadlines under Superior Court Rules matter. Review the rules - do not expect that you will receive accurate information about the rules.
🔹For example, when the final Personal Injuries Summons is drafted, ensure that it is issued and served immediately.
🔹Ask your solicitor for proof of service. This is vital.
🔹From that date of service, the defendant has only 8 weeks to file a defence. 8 weeks only.
🔹Notice for particulars and replies do not stop the clock from running.
🔹You are entitled to file a Reply to the Defence.
🔹Read the rules.
Please share.
Many people choose an unsuitable solicitor.
In the first instance, check 👇
Use the Law Society’s Check a Solicitor’s Record: lawsociety.ie/public/discipl….
Search by surname or address.
But do carry out a reasonable amount of due diligence if engaging a solicitor that you do not know. Seek recommendations.
I note today on LinkedIn that @EUCssrMcGrath is promoting his work on consumer protection and “digital fairness” and such like.
The irony will not be lost on those who are facing enforcement proceedings in our courts.
Please see my response below. All reposts are appreciated.
@PMJAudits @Wftproof @ArturNadol7566 @alomohan @SamanthaLaDuc @kshaughnessy2 @kenoflynnTD @JMcGuinnessTD @johnmcdonnellMP @premnsikka @TransparencyTF
The #PostOfficeScandal | Horizon and Ireland’s debt-recovery machine are not the same but they share a structural pattern that is hard to ignore.
🔹In both, institutions with superior resources and privileged access to the legal system assert or asserted that ordinary people owed it money.
🔹In both, those people said the claimed amount was false and/or elements wholly unprovable.
🔹In both, the institution treated its own records and assertions as sufficient, pursued the individuals relentlessly, and for years dismissed systemic problems.
🔹The human cost in each case has been severe: ruined reputations, lost homes and businesses, family breakdown, suicides and, in the Post Office cases & in certain debt enforcement cases, imprisonment.
🔹The difference in legal form - criminal prosecution versus civil enforcement - is real and important.
🔹It does not erase the parallel in how power was exercised and how evidence was treated.
2/
The shared pattern
🔹The Post Office used data from the Horizon system to claim that sub-postmasters had stolen or failed to account for money.
🔹When those people insisted the figures were wrong, the Post Office’s response was that the system was reliable and the shortfall was theirs.
🔹Hundreds were prosecuted. Many were convicted. The later court findings that Horizon contained bugs, errors and defects capable of creating phantom shortfalls, and that the prosecutions were an affront to justice where that data was central, came only after years of denial and litigation.
🔹In Ireland, after the financial crisis, banks sold large books of distressed loans to investment funds. Credit servicers then pursued the borrowers.
🔹Debtors have repeatedly claimed that the party suing them has not properly proved ownership of the debt, that the supporting documents are incomplete or defective, or that the amount claimed does not match what is actually owed.
🔹Courts have seen affidavits that assert conclusions rather than exhibit primary evidence, incomplete chains of title, and, in some cases, disputed or forged signatures.
🔹Master of the High Court Edmund Honohan publicly stated that bank affidavits had “fallen from grace,” no longer enjoyed any presumption of accuracy, and that justice required scepticism.
🔹He criticised the practice of seeking summary judgment on the basis of such affidavits without proper testing.
🔹These are civil proceedings, not criminal ones. Yet the institutional posture is recognisable: the records are treated as reliable, the burden is placed on the individual to disprove them, and challenges are met with resistance.
You should enquire how many AGs, civil servants, solicitors, barristers and judges have opined on VAT fraud in our agricultural sector - it was / is ongoing but is apparently not a matter that is in the public interest - all designed by @kpmg to favour “cronies and vested interests”.
Millions of euros between time spent & “professional fees” - most definitely a misnomer in these sorry events.
And all these individuals are funded by the same taxpayers, who are being defrauded.
You gotta try this some time?
Reliably informed that @talktoBOI is on notice that debt is being serviced from their customers obtaining proceeds from a fraudulent VAT scheme
This is notice that @talktoBOI has loan repayments that are coming from a tax fraud funded, in the end, by the same taxpayers who then pay the professional fees to barristers who claim it doesn’t matter and the salary of a judge who says (in best D4 accent) that this is not in the public interest.
All legals will baulk at their integrity being questioned, as indeed Senan Allen did.
A bank that is on notice and keeps taking the proceeds of a fraudulent scheme is not in the same position as a lender who simply has a farmer customer @alomohan
Taking those repayments, applying them to the loan, and treating the facility as clean credit is dealing with property the bank has been told is tainted.
Enquire how that notice of VAT fraud proceeds was handled internally — credit, legal, internal audit and AML — and whether the repayments can still be booked as ordinary debt service.
Where / who are the external auditors?
Wait! @KPMG_Ireland - the Big4 who designed the scheme back in the day. I wonder when it will own up to it and confirm the motivations.
Or will this be another tale for @claudinecassar ?
As I have been saying, we are not serious country when Revenue, a pillar bank and Legals & judges work together to whitewash such schemes. @NiamhParker4
Maybe some professional of integrity out in the @kpmg world might see another brewing scandal before the documentary comes out. We live in hope.
@kpmgaustralia @KPMGAfrica @KPMG_BE @KPMGBoston @KPMGCH
@KPMG_US @kpmguk @KPMG_DE @KPMGIndia @KPMG_Canada @KPMG_Canada @KpmgCareersIrl
🔹 KPMG has just agreed to pay $224.5 million to settle investor claims over its audits of Silicon Valley Bank, the 2023 collapse that wiped out shareholders after a $42 billion run.
🔹The firm’s response was the usual:
a “strategic decision,” “not an admission of wrongdoing,” and a declaration that it stands by its work.
🔹In Ireland, KPMG was the long-serving auditor of Allied Irish Banks, Irish Nationwide, and Irish Life & Permanent in the years before the 2008 crash.
🔹Those institutions (and others) required tens of billions in taxpayer rescues - AIB alone absorbed roughly €21 billion.
🔹Within months of clean audit opinions, the Irish state was forced into one of the costliest bank bailouts in history.
🔹KPMG partners later told the banking inquiry they had “significant concerns” about liquidity and solvency at AIB, yet still signed off.
🔹Months before Irish Nationwide’s collapse, the firm told the regulator its controls were “much improved” and its business model was fine.
🔹A subsequent regulatory review found the audits “satisfactory” under the rules of the day - rules the same review described as “found wanting.”
🔹In other words, the paperwork was in order while the banks were already hollowed out.
🔹The pattern is familiar: clean opinions, catastrophic failures, large fees collected along the way, and eventual settlements that carefully avoid any admission of liability.
🔹Investors and taxpayers foot the bill either way.
🔹The Silicon Valley Bank deal is simply the latest entry.
reuters.com/business/finance…
How Ulster Bank Misled @OireachtasNews Finance Committee:
“None of these products were sold” - how Ulster Bank placed Irish SME customers into undisclosed swaps / derivatives, then into GRG Ireland.
“None of these products were sold.”
🔹That is the rather dubious position Ulster Bank put to the Oireachtas Finance Committee in 2025.
🔹CEO Paul Stanley stated that the bank did not sell fixed-rate loans combined with interest-rate swaps as a single product in the Republic.
🔹So far that appears to be true. In fact, if Ulster Bank did engage in such sales, this would have been a significant regulatory breach as no regulatory licence existed to sell such products.
🔹Instead however RBS/Ulster Bank devised a way of achieving the exact same outcome.
🔹Existing variable rate SME borrowers were approached by Treasury sales staff and were offered the simple fixing of their interest rate.
🔹The customers were warned of expected interest rate hikes and told they may not be able to make loan payments on foot of such increases.
🔹Internally, not only was the discussion about the opposite, I.e. incoming lower interest rates, rates were in fact driven sharply downwards.
🔹RBS (parent of Ulster Bank) was later fined by the FCA, CFTC and others for LIBOR / EURIBOR rigging - that is - deliberately submitting artificially low rates.
🔹It is now understood that this was at the behest of @bankofengland and HM Treasury. Almost all traders falsely accused have now been acquitted.
🔹So the SME customers were in fact placed into swaps/derivative structures they were never shown - with no proper disclosure of the hidden commissions or the extortionate break costs.
🔹Once rates were deliberately manipulated downwards, the resulting technical breaches were used to transfer the customer’s into GRG Ireland.
2/
🔹Some more details- the hidden credit lines booked against the SME expanded dramatically as the mark-to-market moved deep out-of-the-money for the customer.
🔹This crystallised windfall profits and break-cost claims for the bank while simultaneously degrading the customer’s internal credit grade and triggering covenant breaches the borrower never knew existed.
🔹Analogy: It is as if you were sold a “fixed-price” electricity contract for your factory. Unbeknownst to you the supplier had secretly installed a second meter that recorded not just your usage but a separate, invisible liability that grew every time the wholesale price fell. When the supplier later helped push the wholesale price down, that hidden meter spun wildly in their favour, generating a huge unbilled claim. The moment the invisible liability pushed your total exposure over a pre-set threshold written into the small print, they declared a technical breach of contract, terminated the supply agreement, appointed a receiver over the factory premises and equipment, and sold the assets to recover the secret claim you had never been shown. You thought you had simply fixed your rate. They had secretly booked a liability against you from day one that only became enforceable once rates moved in their favour.
Huge respect to Anna Kavanagh @AllianceBirth for her powerful intervention at the Westminster summit on protecting the wellbeing of whistleblowers.
Anna raised the deeply disturbing case of ‘Patrick’, the failures surrounding Tusla and the family courts.
@OCallaghanJim @HMcEntee @breeda_murphy @TransparencyTF
From today, Mr Martin Lawlor, the former Director of Elections for @FineGael will be the President of the Law Society of Ireland. @LawSocIreland @LSRAIreland
Thoughts?
🔹Alarming failure of basic due diligence - a self-styled “fake news” expert falsely claiming a doctorate, listed as “Dr” by the university, and appointed expert assessor to the media regulator, all without anyone apparently checking.
🔹That said, an investigation into who was permitted to act as expert adviser/investigator on the Irish banking inquiry would turn up many with clear interests in shaping (or limiting) the narrative.
🔹Ex-CRO of Anglo/IBRC and AIB hired for the scoping and planning phase? Read that again.
@Wftproof @stevemiddi1 @WinkSabee @ArturNadol7566 @alomohan @kenoflynnTD @JMcGuinnessTD
rte.ie/news/primetime/2026/1…
How a freedom of information request has uncovered discrepancies in @TheFCA account of how decisions were made regarding the set up of a review into how the regulator handled the disclosures of & engaged with the late Mr Simon Andriesz.
@TransparencyTF @johnmcdonnellMP @stevemiddi1 @Wftproof
thebanker.com/content/e7e060…
👇👇👇a comprehensive review also required in Ireland.
legalfutures.co.uk/latest-ne…
The unbelievable sequence of events in the ODCE’s Sean FitzPatrick investigation
1/
🔹After Anglo Irish Bank collapsed, the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE) launched multiple massive parallel investigations.
🔹One key strand targeted former chairman Seán FitzPatrick over the non-disclosure of personal loans (the “warehousing” arrangement with Irish Nationwide).
🔹The lead investigator was ODCE solicitor Kevin O’Connell, a lawyer with private-practice and State-solicitor experience who later accepted he had never been trained to take witness statements and was not equipped for the lead role resource pressures pushed him into.
🔹The investigation into FitzPatrick’s “dealings” with Anglo’s auditors @EYnews involved extensive contact with EY partners and their solicitors at A&L Goodbody.
🔹Multiple drafts of witness statements circulated.
🔹O’Connell later accepted the process was flawed, with lawyers “overly involved,” and that statements had been shaped in ways that raised concerns about coaching and contamination of evidence.
🔹Internal concerns about the approach had been raised years earlier.
2/
🔹In May 2015, during FitzPatrick’s first trial, O’Connell spent days in the witness box under heavy cross-examination about how the investigation had been run.
(At same time I awaited an investigation into my protected disclosures re withholding & redaction of critical evidence at banking inquiry).
🔹Afterward O’Connell returned to his office, found additional relevant handwritten notes (his own jottings of calls and conversations, mainly with A&L Goodbody about the EY statements) that had never been disclosed to the defence, and panicked.
🔹He shredded a small number of those documents. He described it as a “calamitous error” made under enormous pressure. The first trial collapsed.
🔹No criminal investigation was opened into the shredding, even though destroying potentially relevant documents in a criminal case is a prosecutable offence.
🔹O’Connell informed the DPP, sought psychiatric help, and later gave evidence about it.
🔹Defence counsel argued he should have been investigated; Gardaí decided it was not necessary.
🔹In the 2017 retrial (which lasted 126–127 days), Judge John Aylmer directed a full acquittal on all charges. He ruled the ODCE investigation fell short of the impartial standard an accused is entitled to.
🔹He cited the coaching/contamination of EY witness statements, the partisan approach, late disclosure, and the shredding of documents by the lead investigator.
🔹‼️The judge noted uncertainty about why those particular documents were selected for destruction. ‼️🔹
🔹Other ODCE Anglo investigations produced convictions; this high-profile one did not.