Former Irish banker denies €7bn cooking of the books
FORMER Anglo Irish Bank boss David Drumm has denied arranging dishonest or fraudulent multi-billion euro transfers to boost the lender’s books in the months before it went bust, a court has been told.
The ex-banker is charged with conspiracy to defraud and false accounting relating to €7.2bn being moved between Anglo and the Irish Life and Permanent (IL&P) and Irish Life Assurance (ILA) companies between March and September 2008. Drumm has pleaded not guilty. In the first day of evidence in a trial that is expected to run for several months, his lawyers told the court that he does not deny the money was moved.
Defence barrister Tessa White said: “David Drumm accepts all of the factual matters relating to the mechanics of how the September transactions happened and the only issue that he disputes is whether they were fraudulent or dishonest or that there was any dishonesty in their reporting.”
In a series of admissions on Drumm’s behalf, Ms White detailed a series of transfers between Anglo and IL&P and ILA as the global financial crisis hit hard in 2008.
The aims were to increase Anglo’s non-bank deposits and to reduce IL&P’s reliance on European Central Bank funding.
More transactions had been planned for December, but they were never completed.
Judge Karen O’Connor told the jury of 10 men and five women that the admissions would considerably reduce the length of the trial.
Earlier, Paul O’Higgins, Senior Counsel for the state, told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court that
Drumm had arranged the €7.2bn September transfer.
He said: “This was a completely artificial process leading to a dressing up, a more than dressing up, a falsification of Anglo Irish Bank’s balance sheet so that its non-bank deposits were €7.2bn bigger than they really were.”
Mr O’Higgins said the money was moved at “lightning speed” and the prime objective was to “dishonestly create the false impression” at Anglo’s year end in
2008 that its non-bank deposits were in the €50 billions.
Drumm was Anglo chief executive from January 2005 until December 2008. He left Ireland for Boston in 2009 after the lender collapsed.
Mr O’Higgins told the court Drumm was the man who “called the shots”.
Anglo was nationalised by the then government, a move that cost Irish citizens €29bn.
Drumm was brought back to Ireland in March 2016.