AIB-owned Goodbody Stockbrokers used numerous questionable trading schemes throughout most of the 1990s, new documents seen by the Sunday Tribune confirm.

The AIB documents show the broker regularly breached regulations and basic standards in the 1990s. The London stock exchange also flagged its serious concerns in June 1997 and in August 1998 about transactions Goodbody carried out with a named fund manager in London.

Concerns about Goodbody Stockbrokers and its use of hidden companies and accounts were disclosed earlier this year by whistleblower Eugene McErlean, who was until 2002 the head of group internal audit at AIB. AIB chief executive Eugene Sheehy last week apologised to the Oireachtas economic regulatory affairs committee about the bank's treatment of McErlean.

Questionable trades and practices went on for much of the 1990s, the documents show. Phone conversations of dealings with clients were not taped by the broker, as regulations demanded, and Goodbody failed to re-categorise, when requested, a professional trading account that had been deliberately named to hide its real identity.

At the hearing last week, Sheehy told Senator Shane Ross and TD Fergus O'Dowd, members of the Oireachtas committee, that an unnamed London-regulated fund manager helped finance companies based on the Isle of Man and the Caribbean to trade in AIB shares in 2001.

Sheehy and AIB's head of risk, Philip Brennan, were also questioned about Goodbody's placing of government-owned shares in Irish Life in the early 1990s.

An AIB spokeswoman told the Sunday Tribune that Goodbody "had no knowledge" of a share support system for Irish Life shares. She said the bank would not name the fund manager that financed the Isle of Man and Caribbean companies.