Young banker enjoyed meteoric rise to succeed Sean FitzPatrick
IF DAVID Drumm’s rise in the world of banking was meteoric, his downfall has been a long, drawn-out affair.
The guilty verdict comes almost a decade after he resigned as chief executive of Anglo Irish Bank as it teetered on the brink of nationalisation.
He spent most of the period between these two events living in the US, where he endured a lengthy bankruptcy process and battle against extradition.
The 51-year-old is a native of the seaside town of Skerries in north Co Dublin.
He was educated by the Christian Brothers and joined Deloitte and Touche from school, where he trained as a chartered accountant.
In 1988, he joined Enterprise Equity, the venture capital arm of the International Fund for Ireland that assisted start-up companies on both sides of the Border.
Five years later, he made a short-lived move to accountants Bastow Charlton, but quickly jumped at a chance to join Anglo as an assistant manager.
The lender was then very much a boutique bank, often catering for borrowers who were refused finance elsewhere.
The bank was impressed with what it saw and by 1995 he had been promoted to manager.
His big break came in 1997 when he was dispatched to the US to grow Anglo’s operation there.
Anglo quickly became a big player in Boston’s real estate market, financing major projects, including the $300m (€255m) Mandarin Oriental Hotel.
Its US operation was seen as being exceptionally responsive to customers, gaining a reputation for making decisions quickly.
The success marked out Drumm as a potential successor for then chief executive Sean FitzPatrick.
He was appointed head of Irish lending in 2002 at the age of 35, and when Mr FitzPatrick announced his retirement two years later, Drumm beat more fancied candidates for the role.
Under his leadership, Anglo became synonymous with the financing of property developers.
Lending grew – and so did profits – but the bank was hopelessly exposed when the global economic crash hit in 2008.
It emerged that December that Mr FitzPatrick, by then Anglo’s chairman, had not been disclosing tens of millions of euro in loans he had from the bank.
Mr FitzPatrick resigned and Drumm followed him quickly out the door.
Drumm and his family moved back to Massachusetts, living for a time in Cape Cod before moving to another home in a suburb of Boston.
Trouble soon followed Drumm across the Atlantic. He had borrowed heavily from Anglo to buy shares in the bank. These were now worthless and loans of €8.5m were being called in.
He filed for bankruptcy in the USin2010.
By that stage, US authorities were also examining an extradition request for Drumm after the Director of Prosecutions decided he should face charges for a number of offences linked to his tenure at Anglo.
Eventually he was returned to Ireland in March 2016, almost seven years after his departure. After a series of delays he finally went on trial in February of this year.