The government has achieved a High Court order which approves of it injecting an additional €3.7 billion into the Allied Irish Banks (AIB) that too without the agreeing of its shareholders.

The bank which had at one time been the nation’s biggest bank will be nationalized effectively, having four out of the six banks in the nation, and the majority of the banking system being controlled by the Government.

The emergency bank restructuring legislation that had been made into the law by the President’s signature on Tuesday was made use of for the first time by the Finance Minister, Brian Lenihan. He will at first bring in a stake of 49.9% in the bank, and then increase it to 92.8 per cent in January.

The lawyers for the Minister got for the government the exclusion of a couple of Irish Times journalists from the order of the court application to put in additional money into AIB.

The court heard that the application was an extremely commercially sensitive issue and was related to matters that had not been shown by the media already.