The foreign exchange scandal at AIB will come back into focus today when a member of its middle management returns to the High Court with his action to prevent the bank from sacking him over his role in the affair.
Séamus Sheerin claims AIB is trying to scapegoat him with responsibility for its failure to deal with a problem that surfaced years before he took charge of the bank's strategic development unit.
Mr Sheerin says that responsibility goes to the top of the organisation, claims that the bank's most senior management has denied.
Mr Sheerin is being supported in some of his claims by another AIB official, Edward A Mulhall, who has been with the bank for 40 years.
One of the central aspects of Mr Sheerin's case is his claim to have been told by AIB's Republic of Ireland managing director Dónal Forde that the price margins for international payments were increased without regulatory approval under the stewardship of Mr Forde in 1998.
In his affidavit, he said the investigation conducted by the Deloitte group confirmed that "the margins on international payments attributable to Corporate Markets' products changed from 0.26 per cent to 0.66 per cent".
Mr Sheerin noted in his affidavit that AIB's outgoing chief executive Michael Buckley was head of the capital markets division at that time of the 1998 increase.
He said that Mr John O'Donovan, senior executive corporate and commercial treasury, told the inquiry that he believed Mr Buckley and Mr Forde "were aware of this issue" at the time.
AIB told the court that Mr O'Donovan's remarks had been taken out of context because Mr Sheerin failed to mention the sentence immediately after Mr O'Donovan's remarks which said that "Forde and Buckley have stated that he (sic) did not have any such knowledge of the matter".
The court also heard from AIB last month that Mr Forde was outraged by the claims Mr Sheerin made against him and rejected the claim that he was motivated by a desire to protect his own position in dealings with Mr Sheerin.
Mr Sheerin also claimed the bank's UK managing director Aidan McKeon had "unresolved issues" in relation to the over-charging.
He said Mr McKeon was "one of the original architects" of the over-charging and, therefore, should not have been the one to investigate his conduct.
AIB told the court that Mr McKeon rejected as completely unfounded Mr Sheerin's claim that he was "directly implicated" in the overcharging and had "unresolved issues" in relation to the investigation.
He had been based in Britain since January 1996, before the obligation to notify foreign exchange charges under the 1995 Consumer Credit Act came into force in August 1996.
