Society blind to white-collar crime

■ Might I suggest raising the possibility of placing criminal liability on those individual bankers who had primary responsibility for the decision to wrongfully preclude individuals from availing of their legal entitlement to their tracker mortgage options? It would serve to wonderfully concentrate the minds of those who are, at present, proving to be so recalcitrant and dilatory in discharging their obligations.

Even the asking of the question will send shudders of fear throughout the banking hierarchy. Furthermore, the law as to criminal conspiracy would also appear to have some application.

The contrast between the State’s attitude to the behaviour of these bankers who consciously devised their wrongful strategy [that it was not so stretches credulity] with the State’s attitude towards a man who wrongfully claimed his late mother’s pension and was recently sentenced to an 18-month term of imprisonment, provides a salutary lesson in this society’s blindness towards white-collar crime.

The latter, despite being in severe family and health difficulties, had at least the excuse that his fraud, unlike that of the bankers, was not a consciously devised scheme but rather a crime of omission – a failure to inform the pension authorities of the death of his mother.

Gerry Roche

Ballyvaughan, Co Clare