EU: The Belgian authorities have ordered an investigation into whether a firm broke the law by revealing confidential banking information of European customers to the CIA.
Thousands of Irish bank transactions are likely to be among those scrutinised, but the Central Bank refused to comment last night on what it knew about the monitoring.
It has emerged that several central banks across Europe knew that the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (Swift) has been providing information to the US authorities. Some did not inform their own governments.
In a statement Swift said yesterday it had been ordered by the US authorities to provide details to anti-terrorism agencies on transactions made on its system. The data provided by the firm has enabled the CIA, FBI and other US agencies to sift through financial transactions made by millions of customers since the US issued a court order to Swift's US subsidiary after the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001.
US authorities say the information gleaned from the monitoring operation provided details that enabled it to crack down on the financing of terrorists.
The name, address and financial affairs of people making and receiving transactions would typically be offered to the US authorities under the deal agreed with Swift. As 77 financial institutions in the Republic use the Swift system, transactions made by thousands of Irish citizens are likely to have been screened by the US authorities.
AIB, Bank of Ireland, EBS Building Society, National Irish Bank all use Swift, as well as a host of financial institutions based in the Irish Financial Services Centre. Every day 64,000 transactions made by Irish citizens or businesses are carried by Swift, which acts as a messaging intermediary for transmitting secure and confidential financial messages between 7,800 financial institutions worldwide.
A report given to the Belgian government yesterday by its central bank highlighted that several EU central banks knew about the monitoring operation by the US authorities and some did not tell their governments. According to the report, 11 central banks - in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the US, as well as Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland - knew that Swift was supplying the data to the US authorities. The European Central Bank may also have known, according to a source who has seen the report.
A spokesman for Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt said yesterday the first that Mr Verhofstadt knew about the monitoring was last Friday following a report published in the New York Times.
He said the government had ordered an investigation by the security services and the treasury.
A spokesman for the Irish Central Bank yesterday refused to confirm or deny that it knew of the covert monitoring by the US authorities. A spokesman for the Department of Finance said the Government had not been informed of the monitoring.
The issue is likely to raise new tensions in Europe, which has repeatedly raised concerns about US tactics employed in its "war on terror".
Dutch MEP Jan Marinus Wiersma, a vice-president of the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, said yesterday there must be serious doubts about the legality of these types of operations carried out by the US. "We also have to ask if this is the best way to fight terrorism," he added.
The European Parliament has repeatedly criticised a US/EU deal over the supply of airline passenger records to the US authorities as an attack on privacy. The European Court of Justice recently declared this deal illegal, although it did not rule on the separate question of whether it undermined the privacy of individuals.
Meanwhile, President George Bush issued a scathing attack on the New York Times for publishing details of the covert monitoring. "Congress was briefed," said Mr Bush. "And what we did was fully authorised under the law. And the disclosure of this programme is disgraceful . . . for people to leak that programme, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America."