Michael Fingleton

Michael Fingleton is a former chief executive of Irish Nationwide Building Society.

Michael Fingleton was born in Tubbercurry, County Sligo in 1938, the son of a local Garda.

He attended St Nathy's school in Ballaghaderreen, and in later years UCD, TCD and Kings Inns.

He attended a seminary, but quit before taking his vows.

In the early 1960s, he joined Allied Irish Finance and simultaneously began studying commerce.

On earning his degree, he went to the Dairy Disposal Agency, a state body that took over defunct creameries in the west of Ireland.

During this period, he studied at night to become a chartered accountant.

Following this, he joined aid agency Concern and from 1969 he spent a number of years organising food supplies to the Republic of Biafra, the short-lived secessionist state in southeastern Nigeria.

He eventually became chairman of Concern.

He joined the building society in 1971 and retired in April 2009 as the effects of the 2008–2012 Irish banking crisis became apparent.

He is known as "Fingers" in the banking community.

In 1971, he became the secretary of the Irish Independent Building Society, founded in 1873.

At the time he was not a homeowner.

The building society had five employees and assets of €2 million.

In his first year at the helm, the company made a profit of just €12,000 and Fingleton had to wait three years for his first company car.

In 1973 he was called to the bar, the same year that Dick Spring, Michael McDowell and Adrian Hardiman were also called, although he never practised as a barrister.

The building society changed its name to Irish Nationwide in 1975 and began to expand.

The key to its expansion was marketing, using the media to build the profile of the business.

The emphasis was on the use of agents rather than opening branches.

Fingleton built it up into a network of 50 branches and 40 branch agents, helped by the takeover of the Garda Building Society, Irish Mutual and Metropolitan Building Society and enacted a flexible mortgage policy in the 1980s.

Fingleton cultivated relationships with the press and benefitted by receiving free publicity.

Many journalists in the 1980s received mortgages from the Irish Nationwide.

Fingleton always stressed that these were all above board.

During the 1980s, when he was at the height of his media profile, he sent journalists a Christmas card portraying himself as Santa Claus.

He began to look for demutualisation legislation in 2001 with the change in the law coming through in August 2006.

In 2002 it emerged that he had an affair with a subordinate who was provided with a £200,000 settlement after she took her case to the Employment Appeals Tribunal.

Fingleton drew a salary of €1.3m in 2005, including a €500,000 bonus making his earnings on a par with chief executives of the larger banks.

In 2007, after failed talks with Germany's HypoVereinsbank and GE Money, he almost sold the building society to Iceland's Landsbanki.

Fingleton set Irish Nationwide's asset value close to €1.3 billion to reflect the equity he expected to be released from any deals.

Fingleton expected to earn up to €15 million from the deal.

Landsbanki who were initially attracted by Irish Nationwide's deposit book, backed off, unnerved by the level of the society's commercial lending.

The Icelandic bank collapsed nine months later.

Fingleton had a reputation as an autocrat and effectively ran a one-man lending department with loans of over €500,000 being personally approved by him.

When Irish Nationwides home loans manager Brian Fitzgibbon sued to stop the building society from sacking him in 2007, it reinforced the impression that Fingleton totally dominated the institution.

In his evidence, Fitzgibbon alleged that Fingleton over-ruled his decision not to lend money to rogue solicitors Micheal Lynn and Thomas Byrne to whom the building society loaned over €10m each.

Fitzgibbon went on to allege that the Nationwide's lending decisions "were entirely informal and controlled by Michael Fingleton".

Fitzgibbon also stated that many loans issued by the Irish Nationwide had not been approved by its credit committee, which existed only to satisfy the requirements of the Central Bank of Ireland.

Fingleton said the society took "adequate provisions" in 2007 for loans to the rogue solicitors as it booked a total loan loss charge of €48.8m.

By the end of 2007, Irish Nationwide had become a major financial institution with pre-tax profits of €390m for 2006 and gross assets of €16.1bn.

He had managed to bring the group's cost-to-income ratio down to 10pc from 14.4pc the previous year.