A Cork businessman is to be retried in New Hampshire for alleged involvement in a corporate accounting scandal that wiped more than $1 billion (€759.5 million) from value of software giant Enterasys.
As US federal prosecutors declared their intention to proceed with the retrial of Jerry Shanahan next September, the US Securities and Exchange Commission said separately that he was one of 10 executives to be sued in a civil action for alleged involvement in corrupt practices at Enterasys.
From Carrigaline in Co Cork, Mr Shanahan (41) is a former chief operations officer with Enterasys Networks. A week before Christmas, he walked free from a New Hampshire courtroom after a jury acquitted him on a charge of falsifying corporate records. The jury failed to agree on five other securities fraud charges.
Mr Shanahan pleaded not guilty to all the charges and denied any wrongdoing.
Four other executives who were tried with him were convicted and are awaiting sentencing. The jury convicted them of securities fraud after hearing how they routed money to Enterasys customers and told them to buy Enterasys products in a fraudulent attempt to boost profits.
Linda Tomlinson, a spokeswoman for the US Attorney's Office in Concord, said Mr Shanahan will be retried in early September and is expected to return from Ireland for the trial.
In a separate development, the SEC said that it has filed civil charges against 10 former Cabletron and Enterasys executives, including Mr Shanahan and Cabletron chief executive Piyush Patel and former chief financial officer David Kirkpatrick.
The SEC's complaint alleges that the executives had falsified figures going back to March 2000, more than a year before Enterasys was spun off from the Rochester-based Cabletron.
Mr Shanahan is accused of setting up side agreements with a Canadian company, one of several deals allegedly designed to artificially boost profits.
According to the SEC, Mr Shanahan and his colleagues "used phony investments to sell products to companies that didn't need them, couldn't pay for and intended to return". They allegedly concealed these deals from the company's auditors and deliberately boosted company earnings by up to 600 per cent.
Mr Shanahan was an executive vice-president of operations at Cabletron and chief operating officer of Enterasys while the deals were taking place.
He was previously awarded a degree in electrical engineering at University College Cork and a Masters degree in business at the University of Limerick.
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