Banking fraud fallout far from Drumm and dusted
HATS off to the garda Sherlock Holmes who nailed arch bankster David Drumm – now send these crack super sleuths after Moriarty.
It took 10 long years to convict this arrogant criminal but his jailing will rightly send shockwaves through the banking sector.
For it finally proves criminal elements that lurk within the country’s financial institutions are not beyond the law’s reach.
This is, without doubt, a milestone and gardai deserve much credit for what Supt Gerard Walsh of the Garda National Economic Crime Bureau described as one of the most complex investigations in the State’s history.
What’s the chances Supt Walsh and his team will now be ordered to go after those named in the damning Moriarty Tribunal findings.
It’s there in black and white but there are very few who want to talk about it let alone pursue a trail which will lead right to the Dail door and expose the diseased heart of Irish politics.
Still, the inevitable jailing of David Drumm, known to his buddies as “Drummer”, is a small victory as white collar criminals here were virtually immune from prosecution never mind conviction. The tracker mortgage scandal in which hundreds of millions of euro was stolen from up to 50,000 account holders shows the bankers still believe they are beyond the law.
Just as Drummer claimed his con job involving €7.2billion was not fraud the current crop of banksters put down their tracker mortgage scandal as incorrect interest rate charges when in reality it is premeditated mass theft.
While Drumm’s conviction is to be celebrated you have to laugh at claims his conviction brings to a close a dark chapter in Ireland’s financial history.
My arse it does, our children and their grandchildren will pay for this arrogant criminal recklessness and criminality for the next 50 years.
While Drumm deserves whatever sentence Judge Karen O’connor decides to hand down he has reason to feel hard done by.
He may well wonder why those who cheered him or even encouraged him to commit this massive fraud are on huge pensions while he is in a prison cell.
If this was the US a deal would have been done to allow Drumm to sing and point the finger at those who at best turned a blind eye to an
WHY don’t politicians and senior servants do the Lotto? Because this syndicate know they’re going to get a jackpot anyway.
It’s not unusual for a top public servant to retire with a €300,000 payoff while some politicians can retire at 50 with a huge signing-off fee and a gold-plated pension.
TDS recently voted through measures to push up the State pension age to 68 yet most of them and some public servants can retire on a full pension at 65.
It just shows that in Leo’s Republic of Opportunity we’re all equal, but just like on Mr Orwell’s Animal Farm, some are more equal than others.
Remember that when they come looking for your vote in the very near future.
THIS country has often been accused of being backwards but in some ways Ireland was way ahead of its time.
Take human trafficking for instance. The Irish State and its handmaidens of horror in the religious institutions had the market in stolen babies cornered as far back as the 1950s.
For all we know there might have been 90,000 babies ripped from their mother’s arms and sold abroad. oneveryone, the cops, judges, doctors and politicians were in it but last week the current Taoiseach was totally in the dark. Indeed Leo described the scandal of illegal adoption registration as “another dark chapter in the country’s history”. No doubt Leo will sort it out, he’s the time lord Taoiseach who can rebuild Ireland by 2040 but can’t deal with the dark chapter of 3,500 children living in hotel rooms and B&BS now. enormous crime and, at worse, encouraged fraud on an industrial scale.
The Anglo Tapes allowed us to hear the contempt the banksters had for the State and its institutions, referring to the Financial Regulator as “Freddy f***ing fly” and Central Bank executives as “clowns”. In the latter case that was probably right.
Drumm even boasted he could get billions from the taxpayer and came up with a figure which he said he pulled out of his arse.
But it should be remembered that up until months before Anglo’s collapse the likes of Drumm and Seanie Fitzpatrick were being lionised by politicians and business leaders.
They were the brave new face of corporate Ireland who in reality could not organise a piss-up in a brewery never mind run a financial institution. Drumm tripled Anglo’s loan book in a few years – seen as a huge achievement in Celtic Tiger Ireland. The only snag was that he gave the cash to people who could not pay it back and had no collateral to back up the loans and his rotten bank went bust.
The actions of Drumm and the others who ran Anglo into the ground resulted in a trail of destruction including suicides and broken families.
Instead of the bank being liquidated on the spot, taxpayers ended up paying €30billion and it’s not over yet as Anglo’s wind up is still costing €100,000 a day.
You could build a house for the homeless every second day with the liquidation costs for Drumm’s former bank and this will go on until at least 2022.
It is hardly surprising young people are not particularly interested in the fallout from the Anglo catastrophe but they should be concerned as they will be feeling its consequences until around 2050.
There has already been a musical about the Anglo debacle and who’s to say there won’t be a movie loosely based on it at some time in the future.
And when the judge in the film condemns the central character to a lengthy spell in jail and is challenged on how they came up with such a sentence, he or she might say, “I plucked the figure out of my f***ing arse”.
Touche. I DON’T know if Argentina will win the World Cup but that country’s decision to pull out of the upcoming friendly against Israel has won them the hearts of millions.
It is understood Lionel Messi and his teammates were unhappy about the Jerusalem fixture after the recent murdering spree by the Israeli army.
The murder of young medic Razan al-najjar as she was trying to help an injured protester was particularly shocking to most people except of course the Israelis and Americans.
Apparently as a Unicef ambassador the legendary Barca striker could not bring himself to play against a nation which uses snipers to shoot children.
It’s past time sporting and other bodies followed Argentina’s example.