Former Anglo Irish Bank CEO David Drumm has named those he believes need to be part of an inquiry on what happened the night of the £400 billion bank guarantee by the Irish government on September 28th 2008.

In a further interview with the IrishCentral, Drumm said:

“Patrick Neary, the Financial Regulator, John Hurley, the Central Bank Governor, and Kevin Cardiff, the Secretary General in the Department of Finance, former Taoiseach Brian Cowen TD, former AIB Chief Executive Eugene Sheehy and AIB Chairman Dermot Gleeson, former Bank of Ireland Chief Executive Brian Goggins and Chairman Richard Burrows, and the representatives from Merrill Lynch who advised the Government and who are in a unique position to shed light on what exactly that advice was…”

“This intentional and systematic misinforming and misleading of the Irish public in relation to the government guarantee and the events leading up to it has been been going on for several years and it has to stop if the public is to finally understand what happened.”

Among the questions that need answering, he believes, is who among the group present that night at government buildings supported a blanket guarantee and who was against it and why?

He also says the public needs to know why were the other alternatives ruled out and specifically what was the advice received from Merrill Lynch and what documents were brought forward in support of the guarantee.

He also asks, “On what basis was it decided that a €400 billion risk was a better outturn for Ireland than simply funding the banks?" he asks.

“How much would it have cost to give the banks the funding support they needed and avoid a guarantee?"

He also queried whether the guarantee was funded on the basis that the Irish Central Bank did not have the funds to support its banks.

He also wants to know if other bank CEOs were involved in the decision. “Were the chief executives and chairman of BOI and AIB part of the decision making group on the night in question?”

Referring to the leak of the tapes last week to the Irish Independent of internal Anglo Irish Bank conversations, Drumm said they were deliberately edited to create “the false impression that Anglo Irish Bank misled the Irish Government into issuing its blanket guarantee in September 2008.”

“This is simply not true and not supported by the facts.”

Referring to the now infamous tapes he noted that the Irish Independent received only a few tapes out of many ‘thousands of hours’ of recordings from an anonymous donor who, obviously, had carefully chosen the selections to further his or her agenda.

“These selective tapes were further edited by the Irish Independent before release to the public,” he said.

Responding to comments made by Patrick Honohan, Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland that criminal prosecutions against him should be considered, Drumm stated:

“The authorities, including the Central Bank, have had all recordings of all telephone conversations in the bank at the relevant time in their possession for over four years. Everyone, Anglo and its officers and directors have been investigated by the ODCE, the An Garda Siochana and the Central Bank, as well as the internal investigations that were carried on in the bank itself after it entered public ownership. These investigators have had all of the telephone records as well as all the documents that Anglo gave to the Central Bank during the time that Anglo sought liquidity assistance from the Central Bank. Yet, there has been no allegation of wrongdoing against anyone in the bank related to the subject matter on the tapes, which conclusively proves that there was no attempt to mislead the Central Bank or any other criminal or fraudulent conduct relating to the request to the Central Bank for liquidity assistance or to the Government's decision to issue a blanket guarantee, which they didn't even discuss with Anglo.

"There is no reason why all communications, presentations and documents, including daily cash flow forecasts, which Anglo submitted to the Central Bank in September 2008 in support of the bank's request for liquidity assistance cannot be made available to the public to inform this issue and to satisfy the public's right to be accurately informed. They will prove that there was absolutely no attempt or desire to mislead anyone about the extent of the bank's problems."