Rush to record call about €7.2 billion deal

IRISH Life and Permanent rushed to record a phone call about its €7.2billion transaction with Anglo Irish Bank just as the bank was collapsing, the David Drumm trial heard yesterday.

Irish Life executives knew their phone calls were being recorded, so they wanted to leave a voice trail that the transaction really had happened, in case Anglo collapsed.

One bank executive said that the telephone call should be in easy-to-understand banking language to avoid ‘f***ing confusion in anyone’s mind’.

During a phone call in 2008, Peter Fitzpatrick, ILP group head of finance, asked a colleague if there were any documents to prove the deal had taken place.

Mr Fitzpatrick said ILP would be ‘massively exposed’ if the deal was not recorded and said that ordinary banking language should be used to make sure people understood the deal.

Yesterday, the jury at David Drumm’s conspiracy-to-defraud trial heard audio footage of a phone call between Mr Fitzpatrick and Paul Kane, a former ILP liquidity manager, who was giving evidence.

Mr Drumm, 51, former CEO of Anglo, accepts that multi-million-euro transactions took place between Anglo and Irish Life & Permanent (ILP) in 2008 but disputes they were fraudulent or dishonest.

He has also pleaded not guilty to false accounting on December 3, 2008, by furnishing information that Anglo’s 2008 deposits were €7.2billion larger than they were.