DUBLIN (AP) — Three former senior bankers were sent to prison Friday for their roles in concealing the loss of billions in deposits at the defunct Anglo Irish Bank, the biggest accounting fraud in Irish corporate history.
Judge Martin Nolan told the trio — former Anglo executives Willie McAteer and John Bowe and former Irish Life and Permanent chief executive Denis Casey — they were guilty of committing “sham transactions” designed to inflate Anglo’s deposit levels by 7.2 billion euros ($8 billion) in the Dublin bank’s 2008 earnings report.
Anglo’s cost to taxpayers long was estimated at close to 30 billion euros, nearly half the size of Ireland’s own bailout. But Ireland is clawing back billions as its “bad bank” auctions off sites and developments to a revived property market.
Anglo’s two most senior figures, former chairman Sean FitzPatrick and chief executive David Drumm, remain free on bail pending their own trials for fraud and other offenses expected to run separately into 2017 at least. They face dozens of charges connected to a string of accounting scandals.
Drumm fled to the United States in 2009, failed to win bankruptcy protection there after a judge ruled he used his wife to shelter assets, and spent five months in a U.S. jail while unsuccessfully fighting extradition back to Ireland in March.
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