Anglo jury sent home after second day of deliberations

The jury in the trial of four former bankers accused of conspiracy to defraud in 2008 has been sent home after a second full day of deliberations.

Four former executives from Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Life & Permanent (ILP) are alleged to have conspired to mislead investors about the true health of Anglo.

The jurors have deliberated for eight and a half hours. At 4.30pm on Thursday, Judge Martin Nolan told them to stop their deliberations, go home and to return on Friday.

Denis Casey (56), from Raheny, Dublin, John Bowe (52) from Glasnevin, Dublin and Willie McAteer (65) of Greenrath, Tipperary Town, Co Tipperary and Peter Fitzpatrick (63) of Convent Lane, Portmarnock, Dublin have all pleaded not guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to conspiring together and with others to mislead investors by setting up a €7.2 billion circular transaction scheme between March 1st and September 30th, 2008 to bolster Anglo's balance sheet.

Prosecution case

The prosecution case is that the four men were involved in a setting up a circular scheme of billion-euro transactions where Anglo lent money to ILP and ILP sent the money back, via its assurance firm Irish Life Assurance, to Anglo.

The scheme was allegedly designed so that the deposits came from the assurance company and would be treated as customer deposits, which are considered a better measure of a bank’s strength than inter-bank loans.

The €7.2 billion deposit was later accounted for in Anglo’s preliminary results on December 3rd, 2008 as part of Anglo’s customer deposits figure. The prosecution says that the entire objective of the scheme was to mislead anybody reading Anglo’s accounts by artificially inflating the customer deposits number from €44 billion to €51 billion, a difference of 16 per cent.

Lawyers for the Anglo defendants have argued that the deposits were real deposits and were accounted for correctly on Anglo’s balance sheet and so no fraud was carried out.

Lawyers defending the former ILP executives say their clients had no control over how Anglo would account for the deposits and that their clients had no intention to mislead the public.