the end of the affair
I walked into Allied Irish Banks office in Naas yesterday.
Having banked with them for twenty five years, I had decided to close my account.
I'd never liked them.
I only banked with them because some of my relatives had associations with the bank.
And over the years it had always been on my mind to close my account. Somehow I never quite managed it.
Laziness, I suppose.
Of course there had always been niggles.
Right from the start.
Little things that annoyed me.
Over the course of my time with AIB, the bank progressively and surreptitiously introduced a host of frivolous banking charges.
You were charged to check the balance in your account. You were charged to take money out of your account. You were charged to put money in your account. You were charged for using your account to top up a mobile phone. You were charged for being late paying off a loan. You were charged for paying off a loan faster than AIB expected you to pay it off.
I knew from the start that these people were not good businessmen.
They regarded their customers as captives.
They genuinely believed they had engineered a situation where no matter how terribly AIB behaved, customers would never walk away.
In the 1980's I took out loans from AIB for my doomed bookmaking business.
We didn't make books, you understand.
We accepted bets on greyhounds and horsies.
And, er, occasionally we placed bets ourselves.
The business went bust but of course I made sure AIB got paid every penny I owed them.
Back in 1991 my credit cards were stolen.
The cards were used to pay motorway toll charges in Italy.
AIB never refunded me the cost of those charges.
An AIB staff member suggested to me that perhaps I had used the cards myself to pay motorway tolls for truckers in Italy.
It should have been enough to end the relationship there and then.
But I was too lazy and too indebted to move.
A few years later while I studied journalism at the College of Commerce in Rathmines, the manager of AIB Rathmines laughed in my face when I suggested his bank might give me a loan to consolidate my debts.
He was, like many of AIB's male staff, a Dude-Where's-My-Car.
They're not good for business.
But I stayed with AIB.
Through a quarter of a century of Dudes-Where's-My-Car condecension and incompetence.
About ten years ago AIB unilaterally changed the terms and conditions whereby credit card transactions were conducted.
A customer could now only make a deposit to their credit card account once a month.
"This will cost you money," I told an AIB counter assistant.
"It's the same everywhere," she sniffed.
Her comment was a reference to similar practices being introduced simultaneously at Bank Of Ireland and Ulster Bank who operate an illegal cartel with AIB.
A cartel means the three banks treat their customers in precisely the same way, introducing similarly inconvenient unilateral policies to suit themselves, and never undercutting each other on price, so there's never any real choice for the general public and not much point in customers moving their business elsewhere.
The wheel is rigged.
And it's the only game in town.
I looked hard at the AIB sniff girl.
"People won't like this. It leaves a sour taste. This will cost you money," I repeated.
She repeated her comment and her sniff too.
It was clear AIB had no interest in the opinions of individual customers.
They didn't compete for our business.
Or worry about losing it.
They assumed that by creating such a stagnant non competitive banking environment in collusion with the other banks, people simply wouldn't bother to move their accounts.
Anyway, so AIB thought, the big money was in house mortgages.
Why bother worrying about individuals with tiddly little savings accounts and credit cards.
The thinking was foolish and erroneous.
Any company that deliberately treats its customers like dirt is due for a fall.
Again I didn't move my account.
Too lazy.
Around the same time as AIB unilaterally and without consultation, changed its terms and conditions for credit card holders, AIB also began trying to force its customers to sign up for internet banking.
Customers going into AIB Naas were deliberately inconvenienced at the counter.
Long queues were allowed to form.
One morning I entered AIB Naas and took my place in the queue.
Staff members from AIB including the manager were walking up and down the queue accosting members of the public.
While people glared and protested, the AIB staff members insisted that there were more convenient ways of doing their transactions than queueing for the counter.
Customers were compelled to leave the queue and use self service deposit boxes which the staff informed them would be more convenient from now on.
Some customers walked out.
Two students told the manager to f--- off.
The manager looked at me.
He mistook me for my businessman brother, greeted me and left me alone.
I too walked out.
I went to Bank Of Ireland.
In Bank Of Ireland on precisely the same morning, I witnessed staff members walking up and down the queue attempting to harass customers into changing their banking practices.
I went to the Ulster Bank.
There was a smaller queue there.
Staff members of Ulster Bank were walking up and down the queue harassing customers.
I realised that none of these banks deserved my business.
Still I didn't move my account from AIB.
A few years later John Rusnak, a bank employee, stole 700 million dollars from AIB.
The Board Of Management of AIB remained inexplicably in place after Rusnak's theft.
The Irish Times and The Irish Independent, with either journalistic incompetence or criminal complicity, commented that 700 million wouldn't mean much for AIB since AIB was making billions in profits every year.
The Rusnak theft was the last wake up call.
Any bank that could allow such a theft and hold none of its senior management accountable was in deep deep trouble.
Last year Reality finally kicked in.
You know folks in any era of delusion there's always a Reality Check.
The lies ultimately collapse upon themselves.
If thieving and lying as an instrument of financial policy worked, why then the economies of Africa and China and North Korea and Vietnam and Cambodia and Soviet Russia would have delivered a good life to their people.
I'm telling you.
Reality always confounds the liars in the end.
Let's look closer to home.No matter how often dishonorable and dishonest Irish economists and government ministers blamed Ireland's financial problems on America or Britain, eventually Reality was always going to kick in and pull the rug from under them.For the past quarter century, AIB and its illegal cartel companions in Bank Of Ireland and the Ulster Bank, have been declaring billion dollar profits.
These profits were based on false accounting.
These profits would evaporate overnight.
Suddenly it emerged that no bank had any assets whatsoever.
They were all about to cease to exist.
And according to the bankers, if they ceased to exist, our countries would also.
Well they would say that, wouldn't they.The multi billion dollar profits which AIB, Bank Of Ireland, Ulster Bank, Irish Life And Permanent Bank, Trustees Savings Bank, and the legendarily corrupt IRA Russian Mafia shell institution styled Anglo Irish Bank, had been declaring for years were purely fictional.
In September of 2009 it emerged that the banks had no money.
None of them.
Anywhere.
Their plush glamorous city centre sky scraper head offices should have been collectively renamed Knotacentium Towers.
(It's pronounced Nosham Taws.)
They'd been paying themselves and their staff millions a year for doing nothing.
Instead of preserving a healthy working relationship with real customers, they'd gone after a pipe dream of money for nothing.
AIB in particular had invested its entire business vision in the concept of the High Net Worth Individual.
A High Net Worth Individual is somebody who hasn't a bean but who owes AIB a couple of thousand million dollars and will never repay it.
AIB could always find it in its heart to respect those alright.
Over the past two decades AIB and the other banks had colluded with each other and with business developers in a malign attempt to corner the property market.
That's why they didn't give two hoots about the rest of us.
They had neglected, mistreated, mocked and abused their individual customers.
They had gone bald headed in pursuit of a mythical pot of speculative property gold whilst ignoring the modest but real and sustainable business they would have been able to guarantee in perpetuity simply by treating their long established personal customers with appropriate care, politeness and respect, and by behaving with probity and restraint in the amount of remuneration they accorded themselves and their staff.
Now the whole house of cards was collapsing on top of them.
For a time they tried to blame corrupt American banks for their own corruptions.
Nobody bought it.
Still in the teeth of the gale of their own collapse, AIB and the other bank insisted on retaining the cosmically overpaid and corrupt board members who through their incompetence and thievery had bankrupted the entire banking system overnight.
Those who rule us from the shadows don't surrender power too readily.
Satan never willingly gives up his kingdom.
Since these multi million dollar a year salary men were being left in place, it looked like the banks must self destruct completely.
But no.
One thing could save them.
Ireland's corrupt kleptocratic Fianna Fail government.
Fianna Fail would fly in the face of Reality.
Fianna Fail could save AIB, Bank Of Ireland, Irish Life And Permanent and indeed the most heavily indebted bank, the shall we say "niche" bank called Anglo Irish Bank which most people had never heard of, and which happened to be the personal bank of Fianna Fail members and associates and which also happened to owe more money than every other bank in Ireland combined.
At present Fianna Fail have signed the Irish people up to a debt at Anglo Irish Bank potentially in excess of sixty thousand million dollars.
The bailing out of Seanie Fitzpatrick and Gillian Bowler (and their shall we say "shadowy" IRA Russian mafia puppet masters) is an act of high treason and threatens the existence of the nation.
You couldn't make it up.
I'm actually not making it up.
Fianna Fail used our money to pay the losses incurred by Anglo Irish's billion dollar thief Seanie Fitzpatrick and his accomplice Gillian Bowler. Bowler's bank had transferred billions of dollars to Fitzpatrick's bank to conceal Fitzpatrick's bank's massive losses.
But it was all gonna be okay.
Because Fianna Fail was spending Ireland into the Third World in order to cover their banking losses.
Now Fianna Fail decided to compel the Irish people and nation to take on the gambling losses of all these banks.
The management of the banks continued to pay themselves millions of dollars a year to run companies that they had destroyed.
The Irish people would meet the bill.
There was never any need for Fianna Fail to bail out the banks in this way.
Certainly Seanie Fitzpatrick's Anglo Irish Bank could have been let collapse.
It already has collapsed you understand.
But it exists as a money pit for the nation because Fianna Fail have guaranteed we will all pay to keep it in existence.
It's still gone folks.
Let's be clear.
Only it's gone and we're still paying for it.
The truth is Fianna Fail doesn't have the power to save Anglo Irish Bank.
They can throw any amount of our money into it, and it will still be gone.
That is precisely what they are doing.
And you know there was never any need to bail out AIB or Bank Of Ireland either.
The government could simply have guaranteed the deposits of ordinary citizens which after all weren't borrowings but consisted of actual money.
And let the gambling property developers pay their own bills.
Instead we're all paying for the gambling losses of cartel operators and gangland criminals.
And inexplicably the same board members remain in place at the helm of collapsed banks, paying themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars to steward businesses that generate nothing, and crying out all the time "you have to pay these salaries to get good people."
Good people?
Yeah.
The people who collapsed the international banking industry worldwide overnight.
Here's a thought why not take a chance on a few up and coming lads who aren't in the golden circle of corruption, and pay em twenty grand a year and let's see what they can do.
I'll tell you one thing.
They won't be any worse than the present crew.
After it emerged that the corrupt kleptocratic Fianna Fail government was keeping AIB afloat with my money, after it emerged that AIB was being allowed to nominate its own Chief Of Staff, after it emerged that the government hadn't insisted that it now owned AIB, I realised that my own time at AIB was indeed coming to an end.
Still I didn't close my account.
A few months ago I got a letter from AIB cancelling my overdraft facility.
The letter was high handed, dismissive and rude.
The letter came to me the same week the Irish government signed into law the package to give thousands of millions of dollars to AIB.
This is the only reason that AIB could afford to disrespect me in this way.
Because the government at a stroke was giving AIB more money than it could ever earn by treating me as a business should treat its paying customers.
The government bail out has eliminated whatever vestiges of motivation that remained for the banks to conduct themselves appropriately towards the general public.
They are getting our money.
And they are giving us nothing in return.
So yesterday I walked into AIB.
I asked a girl at the counter how much money was in my account.
She told me there was 39 Euros in the account.
I told her to close the account.
She did so and handed me just 35 Euros.
"I thought there was 39 Euros owed to me," I said.
"Some interest charges are due," she sniffed.
AIB was saying goodbye the same way as it said hello.
With the frivolous imposition of a frivolous and unwarranted charge.
The sort of behaviour that no company which actually had a professional relationship with its customers could ever indulge in.
Screwing me for a fiver as I walked out the door for the last time.
AIB knew full well that the Irish government was signing me up to pay AIB's debts regardless of whether I banked with them or not.
Losing my business was a matter of no importance to them.
One for the road, eh AIB?
Just time to steal one last fiver before I'm gone.
It's the price of them.
I didn't look back.
Having banked with them for twenty five years, I had decided to close my account.
I'd never liked them.
I only banked with them because some of my relatives had associations with the bank.
And over the years it had always been on my mind to close my account. Somehow I never quite managed it.
Laziness, I suppose.
Of course there had always been niggles.
Right from the start.
Little things that annoyed me.
Over the course of my time with AIB, the bank progressively and surreptitiously introduced a host of frivolous banking charges.
You were charged to check the balance in your account. You were charged to take money out of your account. You were charged to put money in your account. You were charged for using your account to top up a mobile phone. You were charged for being late paying off a loan. You were charged for paying off a loan faster than AIB expected you to pay it off.
I knew from the start that these people were not good businessmen.
They regarded their customers as captives.
They genuinely believed they had engineered a situation where no matter how terribly AIB behaved, customers would never walk away.
In the 1980's I took out loans from AIB for my doomed bookmaking business.
We didn't make books, you understand.
We accepted bets on greyhounds and horsies.
And, er, occasionally we placed bets ourselves.
The business went bust but of course I made sure AIB got paid every penny I owed them.
Back in 1991 my credit cards were stolen.
The cards were used to pay motorway toll charges in Italy.
AIB never refunded me the cost of those charges.
An AIB staff member suggested to me that perhaps I had used the cards myself to pay motorway tolls for truckers in Italy.
It should have been enough to end the relationship there and then.
But I was too lazy and too indebted to move.
A few years later while I studied journalism at the College of Commerce in Rathmines, the manager of AIB Rathmines laughed in my face when I suggested his bank might give me a loan to consolidate my debts.
He was, like many of AIB's male staff, a Dude-Where's-My-Car.
They're not good for business.
But I stayed with AIB.
Through a quarter of a century of Dudes-Where's-My-Car condecension and incompetence.
About ten years ago AIB unilaterally changed the terms and conditions whereby credit card transactions were conducted.
A customer could now only make a deposit to their credit card account once a month.
"This will cost you money," I told an AIB counter assistant.
"It's the same everywhere," she sniffed.
Her comment was a reference to similar practices being introduced simultaneously at Bank Of Ireland and Ulster Bank who operate an illegal cartel with AIB.
A cartel means the three banks treat their customers in precisely the same way, introducing similarly inconvenient unilateral policies to suit themselves, and never undercutting each other on price, so there's never any real choice for the general public and not much point in customers moving their business elsewhere.
The wheel is rigged.
And it's the only game in town.
I looked hard at the AIB sniff girl.
"People won't like this. It leaves a sour taste. This will cost you money," I repeated.
She repeated her comment and her sniff too.
It was clear AIB had no interest in the opinions of individual customers.
They didn't compete for our business.
Or worry about losing it.
They assumed that by creating such a stagnant non competitive banking environment in collusion with the other banks, people simply wouldn't bother to move their accounts.
Anyway, so AIB thought, the big money was in house mortgages.
Why bother worrying about individuals with tiddly little savings accounts and credit cards.
The thinking was foolish and erroneous.
Any company that deliberately treats its customers like dirt is due for a fall.
Again I didn't move my account.
Too lazy.
Around the same time as AIB unilaterally and without consultation, changed its terms and conditions for credit card holders, AIB also began trying to force its customers to sign up for internet banking.
Customers going into AIB Naas were deliberately inconvenienced at the counter.
Long queues were allowed to form.
One morning I entered AIB Naas and took my place in the queue.
Staff members from AIB including the manager were walking up and down the queue accosting members of the public.
While people glared and protested, the AIB staff members insisted that there were more convenient ways of doing their transactions than queueing for the counter.
Customers were compelled to leave the queue and use self service deposit boxes which the staff informed them would be more convenient from now on.
Some customers walked out.
Two students told the manager to f--- off.
The manager looked at me.
He mistook me for my businessman brother, greeted me and left me alone.
I too walked out.
I went to Bank Of Ireland.
In Bank Of Ireland on precisely the same morning, I witnessed staff members walking up and down the queue attempting to harass customers into changing their banking practices.
I went to the Ulster Bank.
There was a smaller queue there.
Staff members of Ulster Bank were walking up and down the queue harassing customers.
I realised that none of these banks deserved my business.
Still I didn't move my account from AIB.
A few years later John Rusnak, a bank employee, stole 700 million dollars from AIB.
The Board Of Management of AIB remained inexplicably in place after Rusnak's theft.
The Irish Times and The Irish Independent, with either journalistic incompetence or criminal complicity, commented that 700 million wouldn't mean much for AIB since AIB was making billions in profits every year.
The Rusnak theft was the last wake up call.
Any bank that could allow such a theft and hold none of its senior management accountable was in deep deep trouble.
Last year Reality finally kicked in.
You know folks in any era of delusion there's always a Reality Check.
The lies ultimately collapse upon themselves.
If thieving and lying as an instrument of financial policy worked, why then the economies of Africa and China and North Korea and Vietnam and Cambodia and Soviet Russia would have delivered a good life to their people.
I'm telling you.
Reality always confounds the liars in the end.
Let's look closer to home.No matter how often dishonorable and dishonest Irish economists and government ministers blamed Ireland's financial problems on America or Britain, eventually Reality was always going to kick in and pull the rug from under them.For the past quarter century, AIB and its illegal cartel companions in Bank Of Ireland and the Ulster Bank, have been declaring billion dollar profits.
These profits were based on false accounting.
These profits would evaporate overnight.
Suddenly it emerged that no bank had any assets whatsoever.
They were all about to cease to exist.
And according to the bankers, if they ceased to exist, our countries would also.
Well they would say that, wouldn't they.The multi billion dollar profits which AIB, Bank Of Ireland, Ulster Bank, Irish Life And Permanent Bank, Trustees Savings Bank, and the legendarily corrupt IRA Russian Mafia shell institution styled Anglo Irish Bank, had been declaring for years were purely fictional.
In September of 2009 it emerged that the banks had no money.
None of them.
Anywhere.
Their plush glamorous city centre sky scraper head offices should have been collectively renamed Knotacentium Towers.
(It's pronounced Nosham Taws.)
They'd been paying themselves and their staff millions a year for doing nothing.
Instead of preserving a healthy working relationship with real customers, they'd gone after a pipe dream of money for nothing.
AIB in particular had invested its entire business vision in the concept of the High Net Worth Individual.
A High Net Worth Individual is somebody who hasn't a bean but who owes AIB a couple of thousand million dollars and will never repay it.
AIB could always find it in its heart to respect those alright.
Over the past two decades AIB and the other banks had colluded with each other and with business developers in a malign attempt to corner the property market.
That's why they didn't give two hoots about the rest of us.
They had neglected, mistreated, mocked and abused their individual customers.
They had gone bald headed in pursuit of a mythical pot of speculative property gold whilst ignoring the modest but real and sustainable business they would have been able to guarantee in perpetuity simply by treating their long established personal customers with appropriate care, politeness and respect, and by behaving with probity and restraint in the amount of remuneration they accorded themselves and their staff.
Now the whole house of cards was collapsing on top of them.
For a time they tried to blame corrupt American banks for their own corruptions.
Nobody bought it.
Still in the teeth of the gale of their own collapse, AIB and the other bank insisted on retaining the cosmically overpaid and corrupt board members who through their incompetence and thievery had bankrupted the entire banking system overnight.
Those who rule us from the shadows don't surrender power too readily.
Satan never willingly gives up his kingdom.
Since these multi million dollar a year salary men were being left in place, it looked like the banks must self destruct completely.
But no.
One thing could save them.
Ireland's corrupt kleptocratic Fianna Fail government.
Fianna Fail would fly in the face of Reality.
Fianna Fail could save AIB, Bank Of Ireland, Irish Life And Permanent and indeed the most heavily indebted bank, the shall we say "niche" bank called Anglo Irish Bank which most people had never heard of, and which happened to be the personal bank of Fianna Fail members and associates and which also happened to owe more money than every other bank in Ireland combined.
At present Fianna Fail have signed the Irish people up to a debt at Anglo Irish Bank potentially in excess of sixty thousand million dollars.
The bailing out of Seanie Fitzpatrick and Gillian Bowler (and their shall we say "shadowy" IRA Russian mafia puppet masters) is an act of high treason and threatens the existence of the nation.
You couldn't make it up.
I'm actually not making it up.
Fianna Fail used our money to pay the losses incurred by Anglo Irish's billion dollar thief Seanie Fitzpatrick and his accomplice Gillian Bowler. Bowler's bank had transferred billions of dollars to Fitzpatrick's bank to conceal Fitzpatrick's bank's massive losses.
But it was all gonna be okay.
Because Fianna Fail was spending Ireland into the Third World in order to cover their banking losses.
Now Fianna Fail decided to compel the Irish people and nation to take on the gambling losses of all these banks.
The management of the banks continued to pay themselves millions of dollars a year to run companies that they had destroyed.
The Irish people would meet the bill.
There was never any need for Fianna Fail to bail out the banks in this way.
Certainly Seanie Fitzpatrick's Anglo Irish Bank could have been let collapse.
It already has collapsed you understand.
But it exists as a money pit for the nation because Fianna Fail have guaranteed we will all pay to keep it in existence.
It's still gone folks.
Let's be clear.
Only it's gone and we're still paying for it.
The truth is Fianna Fail doesn't have the power to save Anglo Irish Bank.
They can throw any amount of our money into it, and it will still be gone.
That is precisely what they are doing.
And you know there was never any need to bail out AIB or Bank Of Ireland either.
The government could simply have guaranteed the deposits of ordinary citizens which after all weren't borrowings but consisted of actual money.
And let the gambling property developers pay their own bills.
Instead we're all paying for the gambling losses of cartel operators and gangland criminals.
And inexplicably the same board members remain in place at the helm of collapsed banks, paying themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars to steward businesses that generate nothing, and crying out all the time "you have to pay these salaries to get good people."
Good people?
Yeah.
The people who collapsed the international banking industry worldwide overnight.
Here's a thought why not take a chance on a few up and coming lads who aren't in the golden circle of corruption, and pay em twenty grand a year and let's see what they can do.
I'll tell you one thing.
They won't be any worse than the present crew.
After it emerged that the corrupt kleptocratic Fianna Fail government was keeping AIB afloat with my money, after it emerged that AIB was being allowed to nominate its own Chief Of Staff, after it emerged that the government hadn't insisted that it now owned AIB, I realised that my own time at AIB was indeed coming to an end.
Still I didn't close my account.
A few months ago I got a letter from AIB cancelling my overdraft facility.
The letter was high handed, dismissive and rude.
The letter came to me the same week the Irish government signed into law the package to give thousands of millions of dollars to AIB.
This is the only reason that AIB could afford to disrespect me in this way.
Because the government at a stroke was giving AIB more money than it could ever earn by treating me as a business should treat its paying customers.
The government bail out has eliminated whatever vestiges of motivation that remained for the banks to conduct themselves appropriately towards the general public.
They are getting our money.
And they are giving us nothing in return.
So yesterday I walked into AIB.
I asked a girl at the counter how much money was in my account.
She told me there was 39 Euros in the account.
I told her to close the account.
She did so and handed me just 35 Euros.
"I thought there was 39 Euros owed to me," I said.
"Some interest charges are due," she sniffed.
AIB was saying goodbye the same way as it said hello.
With the frivolous imposition of a frivolous and unwarranted charge.
The sort of behaviour that no company which actually had a professional relationship with its customers could ever indulge in.
Screwing me for a fiver as I walked out the door for the last time.
AIB knew full well that the Irish government was signing me up to pay AIB's debts regardless of whether I banked with them or not.
Losing my business was a matter of no importance to them.
One for the road, eh AIB?
Just time to steal one last fiver before I'm gone.
It's the price of them.
I didn't look back.
posted by heelers | 12:11 PM
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