Former Anglo boss David Drumm has been handed a six-year jail term

FORMER ANGLO IRISH bank chief executive David Drumm has been sentenced to six years in jail after being found guilty of two charges

Judge Karen O’Connor delivered the sentence shortly after 4pm this afternoon and said that any time already spent in custody should be taken into consideration.

The maximum prison sentence for conspiracy to defraud is unlimited, while the maximum jail term for false accounting is 10 years.

The 51-year-old was convicted this month of taking part in a multibillion-euro fraud scheme in 2008.

An 87-day trial ended earlier this month when a jury at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court returned unanimous verdicts of guilty on two charges of false accounting and conspiracy to defraud.

It was the State’s case that Drumm had conspired with Irish Life & Permanent’s former CEO, Denis Casey, Anglo’s former financial director Willie McAteer and former Head of Treasury at Anglo, John Bowe and others, to carry out €7.2 billion in fraudulent circular transactions in order to bolster the customer deposits figure on Anglo’s balance sheet.

The State also alleged that this €7.2 billion was falsely accounted for as part of the bank’s customer deposits in preliminary accounts published on 3 December 2008, therefore misleading the market as to Anglo’s true strength.

This morning, Detective Sergeant Michael McKenna gave evidence of the billion euro transactions which the State say were fraudulent and designed only to bolster the bank’s balance sheet in September 2009.

After hearing the prosecution evidence and defence submissions, O’Connor adjourned the case to the afternoon before handing down the sentence.

Bail

Drumm, who had been granted bail after his conviction, was present in court for the hearing this morning.

The former banking executive has an address in Skerries, Dublin but lived in Wellesley, Massachusetts, US for a number of years after the collapse of Anglo.

He was subject to lengthy extradition proceedings and was held in custody for five months in a US Federal Penitentiary before he ultimately consented to his extradition in March 2016.

Bowe (54) from Glasnevin, Dublin, McAteer (67) of Greenrath, Tipperary Town, Co. Tipperary and Casey (58) from Raheny, Dublin were convicted in June 2016 on the conspiracy to defraud charges.

Judge Martin Nolan jailed Casey for two years and nine months after telling him that Anglo were the authors of the scheme but that he had behaved disgracefully and reprehensibly in co-operating with it.

He jailed McAteer for three and a half years and imposed a two-year prison sentence on Bowe.

The maximum sentence for the conspiracy to defraud charge is unlimited. The maximum sentence for the false accounting charge is 10 years.

Reporting by Declan Brennan & Sarah-Jane Murphy

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