Drumm sentence spells out an essential lesson

IT HAS been argued that magic is the only honest profession. A magician promises to deceive you and he does; when bankers indulge in deception it ends in disaster, as David Drumm finally discovered yesterday. The €7.2bn fable involving a fraudulent money-goround – green jersey or not – has ended with a seismic shudder, seeing the former Anglo boss jailed for six years.

Dismissing all grandiose pleas, Judge Karen O’Connor said Drumm engaged in “grossly reprehensible behaviour” and his motivation to keep Anglo open was “irrelevant” and did “not provide any excuse for fraud and dishonesty”.

Drumm had played both Joker and King in the ascent of the bank. On his watch, Anglo Irish’s loan book trebled to €73bn during a four-year tenure in charge.

He had claimed during his trial he acted as he did not out of criminality but to prevent the annihilation of the bank that crashed so spectacularly. He left Ireland for Massachusetts in 2009. But by then his shimmering empire had melted beneath his feet.

The country was crippled with debt but in his 4,089 sq ft retreat in the plush suburb of Wellesley, Drumm was well insulated from pain. That was until US marshals banged on his door on foot of an Irish extradition warrant.

His jailing is significant, not just because he is the most senior Anglo executive to be convicted. The bank’s collapse cost the taxpayer €29bn, but the cavalier “to hell with the consequences” attitude epitomised by Drumm and a cohort of others – and facilitated by light-touch regulators – led to disaster, exiled many and destroyed lives.

The past is supposed to be the great cemetery for our illusions, but some of them were kept alive long after they should have been. This sentence signals that consequences still matter and the price of exorbitant illusions will ultimately be paid.