ANGLO CASE BARRISTERS GOT THREE TIMES THE GOING RATE
Senior lawyers earned €3k a day instead of €858
THE State paid the barristers in the trial of ex-Anglo Irish Bank chief Seán Fitz Patrick more than three times the normal daily fee for the two failed Circuit Criminal Court trials.
The senior counsel in the case earned €3,000 a day, even though the standard daily rate for the circuit court is just €858.
On top of that, they were paid an initial ‘brief fee’, which covers preparation for the case and the first day in court, of €40,000. This is over 20 times the size of the standard circuit court brief fee of €1,716. A DPP official requested the high fees be paid to the prosecuting team so they were also paid to the defence team, as per parity regulations. The costs are astronomical
even by the standards of the Central Criminal Court, which is part of the High Court. There, the brief fee for murder is set at €7,127, and the standard daily fee is €1,562 – half of what the FitzPatrick legal team were paid.
The revelations will leave taxpayers furious after a litany of failings by the Office of the Director Of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE) – the State’s corporate watchdog – led to the initial trial collapsing and contributed to the judge in the second trial directing the jury to acquit Mr FitzPatrick.
The initial trial ran for seven weeks in the absence of a jury before being adjourned after it emerged that the ODCE’s legal adviser Kevin O’Connell admitted to shredding documents and, soon after, became unwell. Despite this – and concerns that any further trial had been prejudiced – a second trial was brought by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). Last month, the 126-day retrial collapsed when Judge John Aylmer ruled that the ODCE had adopted ‘an inappropriately biased and partisan approach’ and therefore the case could not proceed.
Documents obtained by the MoS, under the Freedom of Information Act, show that the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform sanctioned pay ‘in excess of the delegated amount’ for legal fees in the high-profile case, following a request from the DPP. ‘I am seeking sanction to pay counsel in excess of the delegated amount for a brief fee in relation to the matter,’ the DPP official said.
A standard brief fee for a senior counsel in a circuit court case is €1,716, with a daily refresher fee of €858. But the DPP felt it was necessary to pay counsel significantly more than this.
The official said: ‘In view of the difficulty and complexity of the case and taking account the interests of the public, the Director believes that an appropriate brief fee is €40,000 with a refresher of €3,000, together with the consequent payment of two-thirds of this fee to junior counsel. I would be grateful if you could sanction the payment of this brief fee.
‘The case is a difficult and complicated one involving a large number of offences over a large time frame coupled with voluminous documentation and novel points of law.
‘It is also one of very great public interest and the first time section 197 has been prosecuted,’ the official said, in reference to Section 197 of the 1990 Companies Act. Mr FitzPatrick, who was granted legal aid, had pleaded not guilty to 27 charges under the Companies Act relating to giving false or misleading information to Anglo’s auditors Ernst & Young, now EY. He was acquitted of all charges.
The payments were sanctioned by the then Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe on the condition they came out of the DPP’s voted allocation and that, in future, junior counsel would be paid half the senior counsel rate – as opposed to two-thirds.
Both the prosecution and defence’s senior counsel were paid a briefing fee of €40,000 – this is the fee paid on the opening day of a trial but includes trial preparation costs.
Paul O’Higgins SC prosecuted the first trial in 2015, while Dominic McGinn SC took charge of the second. Bernard Condon was senior counsel for the defence in both trials.
The prosecution in the second trial had two junior counsel who were paid briefing fees of €26,400 and €16,000 respectively. Because of the retrial, these fees were paid twice. The defence had three junior counsel but the exact breakdown of their fees isn’t known.
An Irish Mail on Sunday analysis of the fees shows a €2.1m difference between the enhanced fees paid to the Anglo trial lawyers and what they would have received at the standard, lower rate. It is estimated €1.1m of this was paid to the defence while the remaining €1m was shared among the prosecution team.
Whenever the DPP considers that an enhanced fee should be paid to a prosecuting team, an equal fee is automatically paid to the defence team. This means the total bill for eight barristers came to almost €3m for both trials – before solicitors’ fees, pretrial fees and other legal costs.
The DPP did not respond to questions from MoS, while the senior counsel for both sides did not respond to attempts to contact them.
‘The case is a difficult and complicated one’