A Bank of Ireland manager told the tribunal she would be very surprised if an official of the bank had approved a blank cheque.
It was "a fundamental prerequisite" that the payee and the amount were on a cheque for foreign exchange approval, said Ms Genevieve Tracy, manager at Ballsbridge. Exchange control approval was needed for payments outside the jurisdiction up to December 1992.
She was responding to Mr Jerry Healy SC, for the tribunal, who said that in his evidence that Mr Mike Murphy, of Mike Murphy Insurance Brokers Ltd, had said he regularly brought blank cheques to a Bank of Ireland branch and had them stamped for exchange control approval.
Mr Murphy had told the tribunal a cheque for £100,000, made out to Credit Suisse which was sent in November 1992 to Credit Suisse bank, London, for lodgment in an account in Zurich, and which ended up in Mr Charles Haughey's account in the Ansbacher deposits, was stamped with exchange control approval by the Bank of Ireland before the amount and payee were filled in.
Mr David Gresty, a Monaco-based business associate of Mr Murphy, said that when the £100,000 cheque had been presented to him in Paris in September 1992, the amount was filled in but the payee was blank.
The cheque was in part-settlement of monies due from Mr Murphy to Mr Gresty, and Mr Gresty agreed it should be invested by Mr Murphy, on his behalf, in Celtic Helicopters. He thought Mr Murphy would make it out to the relevant payee.
A Central Bank official, Mr Louis O'Byrne, said any bank which stamped blank cheques for foreign exchange approval as described would have been "in flagrant breach of the regulations".
He said the Central Bank would have taken "serious steps" against this, "right up to withdrawing their delegated authority" to sanction transactions. He said action had been taken against certain banks when foreign exchange controls were in operation.