Has Bank of Ireland really been deceptive over bonus payments?

Bank of Ireland has been paying bonuses. In fact, it may have been paying many millions of euros in bonuses since accepting state aid in 2008, much to the outrage of the Irish taxpayer.

But has the bank been actively hiding this fact, or has the government just been slow in chasing up the details?

Parliamentary questions now seems to be the place where details of Irish banks' remuneration practices come to light. It is, after all, an easy way for politicians to score some points and create more scathing banker-bashing headlines.

Some new controversy has emerged over the fact that BoI may have been paying some performance-related bonuses since coming under the government bank guarantee scheme, despite telling the Department of Finance in December that nothing had been paid over the course of last year.

Joan Burton TD highlighted this fact during a December parliamentary question, and has since described the payments as "one further act of deceit" by BoI, while Brian Lenihan has assured us that an "urgent investigation" was underway.

But is all this just a matter of semantics? BoI hasn't revealed any figures about bonus payments, but said in a response to the Department of Finance enquiries on 1 December that no performance-related bonuses were paid "with respect to the financial years to March 2009 and December 2009".

However, it also added:

"A small number of people at middle management level received payments which reflected either guarantees which were agreed on their joining the Group or deferred payments where the historic performance criteria had been achieved and the payment was deferred over several years. For commercial reasons BoI do not disclose the amount of such payments. The bank advises that it had no legal discretion in these matters."

In other words, performance related bonuses are not being paid, unless the bank already has contractual arrangements to do so, and it's suggesting it isn't necessary to divulge figures. What's more, it's made no attempt to see if it is legally bound to pay these, as AIB did over the now well-known deferred 2008 bonus payments for its capital markets division.

Undoubtedly, BoI has been evasive on this matter, having avoided producing any figures on bonus payments, despite the fact that all the other Irish institutions under the guarantee have, but you can hardly accuse it of active deception.

Instead, surely it's the government's responsibility to chase this matter up, considering the political sensitivity around banker bonuses in Ireland and the greater influence it now has on the institutions. By failing to do so, it gives yet more ammunition to the opposition parties and fans the flames of public outrage over banker bonuses.

Below is the table submitted to Brian Lenihan by Irish banks (BoI excepted) detailing their bonus payments over the last two years. Most have drastically scaled back both the sums paid out in bonuses and the number of people receiving them: