Via Pearse Doherty comes this result of an FOI request, reported on here:
Merrill Lynch & Co. told the Irish government in 2008 it would cost 16.4 billion euros ($22.8 billion) at most to rescue its banks, a quarter of the eventual bill for bailing out its financial system.
Merrill produced the estimate in a 45-page presentation to the Dublin-based Irish finance ministry on Nov. 18, 2008, according to documents released by the government after a freedom-of-information request by opposition lawmaker Pearse Doherty. Ireland paid the firm 7.3 million euros for banking advice in 2008 and 2009.
Full documents below, OCRd and turned the right way up.
This may be obvious to others but does the department not have to publish this kind of information in a timely manner and information on why this option was not persued?
No, they don’t.
Ah, … at yesterday’s meeting of the joint working group with representatives from the DPER there was a notion that government may be open to making more information available outside of the FOI process. Could this be something that we could try and get a commitment on via the OGP Action Plan? – Would it be the publication of tenders, reports generated by tenderers and all other reports/submissions received together with a rationale for making the decision on which proposal to accept?
I’m going with the Feb 2011 vanity fair article version of events, namely Phil Ingram’s redacted report into the Irish banks SIX MONTHS BEFORE the signing of the blanket bank guarantee.
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2011/02/michael-lewis-on-how-merrill-lynch-and-brian-lenihan-stuck-the-people-of-ireland-with-a-debt-of-106-billion
Or even Unicredit bank whistleblower Jonathan Sugarman’s evidence, see below
http://whistleblowerirl.blogspot.ie/