Drumm’s crime wasn’t victimless – far from it

IT BECAME known as the “bed and breakfast loan”; an unfussy sum of €7bn that enjoyed moving in exalted circles, though its true provenance and value was always bogus. The infamous €7bn played a starring role in the ‘Anglo Tapes’ in a conversation between two senior managers, John Bowe, and Peter Fitzgerald, which flabbergasted the country when first revealed.

Fitzgerald asked how the figure of €7bn was arrived at, and Bowe replied with braggadocio: “Just as Drummer [the former Anglo CEO David Drumm] would say, ‘I picked it out of my a***’.”

Go big or go home, they say, and Mr Drumm went big. So finally, after 86 days, a jury has found him guilty on two counts of fraud: conspiracy to defraud and false accounting. He conspired to bolster the customer deposits figure on the bank’s balance sheet.

With a characteristic mixture of bombast and delusion, he sought to pass this off as donning the green jersey, answering Ireland’s call. The only call Mr Drumm heeded was self-serving greed and, yesterday, a full decade after the crash, the fraud was rightly recognised as criminal.

While the country crashed and burned in the flames of the bonfire sparked by the reckless and ruinous lending unleashed by the bankers, Mr Drumm carried on regardless, even finding work as a financial consultant in the US.

In his defence it was argued that: “Nobody lost, nobody gained, nobody got rich, nobody got poor, and nobody is living on a Caribbean island with ill-gotten gains as a result of these transactions.”

But fraud always comes at a cost, a fact not lost on jurors. The irresponsible and riotous commercial abandon presided over by bankers took a horrendous toll on the people of this country.

The fact that the economy has recovered in no way mitigates against the terrible harm done by Mr Drumm and others who played a significant role in visiting ruin on this country.