“The evidence of conspiracy to do the acts with which Mr O’Mahoney is charged is too tenuous, too remote in both substance and in time”
Prosecution had argued the case could be decided by a jury if a direction was given by Judge Nolan to combine all the circumstantial evidence together to form a compelling conclusion.
Judge Nolan said that after considering the arguments from both sides he had reluctantly come to the conclusion that the case was ‘too tenuous’ to go to the jury and a conviction would be ‘perverse’.
‘The evidence of conspiracy to do the
‘During the trial the court heard that all eight bank accounts were ‘to a greater or lesser extent’ connected to Sean FitzPatrick.
The prosecution’s case was that Aoife Maguire, a member of staff at Anglo, approached members of the bank’s IT team during the Revenue audit in 2003 and requested that certain accounts be deleted from the bank’s system.
However, the IT department members were uncomfortable with this instruction, and archived the accounts rather than deleting them. When the archived accounts were recovered it transpired that some details pertaining to the accounts had been altered.
The prosecution had argued that Tiarnan O’Mahoney was part of an agreement to make a deliberate, concerted effort to alter the details of these accounts and to defraud Revenue.
This trial, lasting 21 days, was a retrial after the Court of Appeal quashed Mr O’Mahoney’s 2015 conviction in April 2016.