Attic Archives

I’m in the process of sorting out old newspapers that have been stored in my attic for some years now, some dating back to the mid 1980s.

From time to time I’ll publish articles that may be of interest.

The following article, by Pat Brosnan, was published in the then Cork Examiner on Monday 11th March 1996.

A very disturbing story was related to me this week, and the unfortunate aspect of it is that the victim of this sorry tale didn’t even know he was taken to the cleaners.

A friend of mine told me how his brother was telephoning a branch of a bank in Cork and happened to get a crossed line.

It was a coincidence that he happened to overhear a conversation that was taking place between and bank manager he was ringing and the manager of another branch of the same bank.

What he overheard related to a discussion the two managers were having about a customer who had complained either about his overdraft or bank charges.

Either way, the customer felt he had paid too much.

The substance of the phony conversation was that the bank had, indeed, overcharged the man – to the tune of £25,000.

And what were they going to do about it?

In this case their customer was the owner of a small business which was in trouble, a fact that they knew only too well.

So what was the advice one of those miserable weeds offered to his colleague?

Offer him £9,000 and he’ll be only too happy to accept it because of the state of his business.

Because this happened some time ago I don’t know what the final upshot of it was. The one regret my friend’s brother had was that the name of the bank’s customer wasn’t mentioned during the conversation, because if it had he would have phoned him and told him what the real score was.

I’m sorry myself, that he was not in a position to do so.

As Irish citizens know to their great cost, nothing has changed. Still rampant criminality within the financial sector, still no regulation.