Brians are dragging us back to the stone age.

Byline: Pat Flanagan

THERE is an old American proverb that says "You don't put robbers to work in a bank" it's just a pity our buffoon of a Finance Minister never heard it.

But when Brian Lenihan didn't bother reading a damning report into Anglo Irish Bank I wouldn't be surprised if he went to Mountjoy if he was recruiting for our financial institutions.

Can you believe this guy? He was handed a document indicating possible money laundering and fraud on a grand scale in a bank he was about to nationalise and he didn't see it.

But yesterday Brian said that even if he'd seen it he might not have done anything about it.

Despite all the confusion about dodgy multi-billion lodgements between Irish Life and Anglo Irish bank one thing is now crystal clear. We have a gobshite in charge of the country's finances.

We can all now say what we wanted to say since that this scandal broke in the autumn and that the Irish banking system is not broke - it is bent.

What was going on here was not incompetence or reckless lending. Think Grand Theft Anglo.

It appears to be a deliberate attempt to deceive shareholders and the markets and Gobshite thinks that's not worth reporting.

He nationalised Anglo, saddled the country with a bankrupt bank which is now facing accusations of criminal behaviour and he wants us to rejoice.

Now that we own it maybe we should give it a name which reflects its standing.

How about First Basket Case bank, or maybe Brian's Black hole.

But no matter what went on at Anglo, the gardai are not likely to get involved because criminals never wear suits so how could there have been a crime in a bank?

Just in case you don't know what was going on it went something like this.

Anglo took EUR4billion of its own money and gave it to Irish Life and Permanent as an inter-bank loan.

ILP then slipped the dosh into one of its non-banking companies which was then sent back to Anglo as a customer deposit. The effect of this was to deceive its shareholders and the markets it was flush with cash when in fact it was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Naturally enough those who fell for this scam and didn't cash in their shares lost the lot when it was nationalised. Now they are very, very angry.

Because of Gobshite's stupidity we are going to be left carrying the can when they sue the state to get their money back.

On the other side of the Atlantic the executives of a firm called Enron were up to the same game years ago.

The top men were taken from their offices in handcuffs by the Feds and, after a fair trial, received long jail sentences.

But how could that happen here when Gobshite said he wouldn't even report it, if he'd noticed it.

Serious questions remain about how the Anglo's own money was passed back to it as a deposit. If a new account was created to hold the cash how did Anglo get around the strict Money Laundering Act? This states in explicit detail the documents needed to open an account, especially one with billions of euro resting in it.

Fr Ted used the same terminology.

To understand why the authorities here are so reluctant to go after the people who have brought the Irish financial system to its knees, you have to go back many years to the corrupt world inhabited by Charlie Haughey and his crooked friends.

You see times may have changed but the culture of that time has not and that is why white collar crime is not just accepted, people like Gobshite don't even notice it.

In a way it's not their fault, they are Charlie's children and - like him - they see nothing unusual, let along wrong, about huge sums of cash swishing from one bank account to another.

Labour leader Eamon Gilmore said the banks had made monkeys of Gobshite and the Government. This is grossly unfair - on our nearest cousins.

On the day which marks Charles Darwin's 200 birthday, this Government has proved the father of evolution wrong.

For the baboons running this country are not evolving, they are going backwards and taking us with them.

Baboons running this nation are not evolving they're going backward

CAPTION(S):

RARE SPECIMENS Cowen and Lenihan reverse evolution with primitive ideas