Judge defers FitzPatrick’s trial until after election citing ‘antipathy’
SEÁN FitzPatrick won’t stand trial until after the next General Election.
The former Anglo Irish Bank chairman, 66, yesterday lost an emergency High Court bid to stop his trial ever taking place.
But he won a seven-and-ahalf month postponement of his trial, that had been due to start in October, due to current public ‘antipathy’ towards him.
The ruling means that he will avoid prosecution until after the current Fine Gael/Labour coalition ends its term in Government by April at the latest.
By the time his trial begins – on May 25, 2016 at the earliest – it will be almost eight years since the financial crisis of September 2008 that led to the January 2009 nationalisation of Anglo.
Mr FitzPatrick’s civil suit began on Friday, when he complained through his counsel Bernard Condon SC of a ‘trashing of his character’ over the past six-and-a-half years. He claimed that he could never get a fair trial in Ireland.
Alternatively, he had sought to delay his trial for as long as possible.
Mr Condon had claimed the former banker suffered ‘massive odium, ridicule and mocking’ in recent weeks since the trial of Aoife Maguire, Tiarnan O’Mahoney and Bernard Daly ended in July.
That trio were jailed at the conclusion of a separate trial on July 31 for between 18 months and three years for conspiring to hide accounts connected to Mr FitzPatrick.
Mr FitzPatrick asked for his own upcoming trial to be delayed in order to allow recent ‘adverse publicity’ arising from that trial to ‘fade’ in the minds of the public.
Mr FitzPatrick’s High Court challenge was treated as a matter of urgency by Judge Michael Moriarty, who issued his decision yesterday afternoon, less than 24 hours after the hearing concluded.
The High Court judge ruled that he would not permanently ban a ‘highly significant prosecution brought by the respondent [DPP] on behalf of the Irish people’.
The judge remarked that one might wonder how the public at large would view such an
‘Massive odium, ridicule and mocking’
outcome.
Giving his decision, Judge Moriarty said: ‘A proposition that attaining a high degree of notoriety in the public eye constituted a bar to being duly tried by judge and jury seems self-evidently untenable.’
The judge said FitzPatrick’s application for a permanent ban on his trial ‘must clearly be dismissed’.
But Judge Moriarty said the alternative remedy sought – a postponement of the start date – was not to be ‘acceded to glibly’.
Mr FitzPatrick had originally been due before the courts this April.
But his Circuit Criminal Court trial was put off until October 5 after a number of legal arguments and delays.
In the original criminal case that had been due to start in April, Mr FitzPatrick of Whitshed Road, Greystones, Co. Wicklow, was accused of failing to disclose to Anglo’s auditors, Ernst & Young, the true amount of loans to him or people connected with him. He had pleaded not guilty to a total of 27 offences under the Companies Act 1990.
Yesterday, Judge Moriarty said that he had examined many of the newspaper articles and radio and TV coverage complained of and commented on their ‘sheer number, intensity and focus’.
Judge Moriarty concluded: ‘The requirements of justice necessitate a deferral.
Of course it does not mean that all antipathy to the applicant [Mr FitzPatrick] will have subsided when the trial restarts, but I believe some particular elements are likely to have subsided by then.’
‘High degree of notoriety’