Former Anglo Irish boss charged with fraud
The former chairman of Anglo Irish Bank is charged in Ireland over a failed insider trading scam.
Sean Fitzpatrick was brought before the Criminal Courts in Dublin for alleged financial irregularities.
He was earlier arrested at Dublin Airport as he arrived from the USA after arranging to meet officers.
The court heard the 64-year-old replied “no comment” when charged with 16 offences by gardai attached to the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement in a city centre garda station.
Each charge relates to advising on and lending millions to a golden circle of investors to falsely inflate Anglo’s share prices.
Former senior executives Willie McAteer and Pat Whelan were charged with the same offences yesterday.
If found guilty, the men would face up to five years in jail for each of the 16 charges of advising and lending millions to a circle of investors to falsely inflate Anglo’s share prices.
All three have been bailed and will reappear before the court on 8 October.
Mr Fitzpatrick served as chief executive and then chairman of the bank, building it up to become what at one time appeared to be one of the biggest success stories of Ireland’s boom years.
However, Anglo was badly exposed by the bursting of the Irish property bubble and suffered the largest corporate loss in the history of the Republic of Ireland.
Anglo was nationalised months later, in January 2009, and has since cost the Irish taxpayer about 30bn euro (£23.4bn) – almost half the value of the country’s bank bailout.
In July 2010, Mr Fitzpatrick was declared bankrupt with debts of 150m euros, mostly due to personal loan guarantees given to Anglo Irish.
Former finance director McAteer, 61, from Rathgar in south Dublin, was arrested yesterday morning on the N7 at Rathcoole on the outskirts of the city.
His alleged co-conspirator and former managing director of lending at the toxic bank, Whelan, 50, was detained at his home in Malahide, north Dublin.
Simon Carswell, a finance correspondent at the Irish Times, wrote the book Anglo Republic: Inside the Bank That Broke Ireland, which looks at the collapse of the bank.
It claims the bank squandered money, including 1.4m euros on golf equipment between 2006 and 2009, including 208,000 euros on golf balls.