Seán FitzPatrick obituary: Poster boy banker who became a toxic figure

Seán FitzPatrick
Born: May 25th, 1948
Died: November 8th, 2021

Seán FitzPatrick, who has died aged 73, was the poster boy banker of Celtic tiger Ireland.

At the height of his powers, he looked and played the part. He had a confident smile and exuded a very clubbable, relaxed and warm bonhomie. Well groomed, his salt-and-pepper hair was nonetheless usually a little tousled, adding somewhat to his boyish good looks. A well-pressed, pale blue or white shirt was likely finished off with a fashionable, salmon pink tie.

In tune with his times, and to some degree also defining them, he extolled the virtues of light touch regulation and sang the praises of entrepreneurs and risk takers. The message – well received at business lunches or at conferences or after dinner speeches – was that Earth was theirs to inherit.

Austin Currie obituary: Stalwart of northern and southern Irish politics

---

Róisín Ingle: First time on a plane since the carry-on. I can hardly believe my luck

---

Brianna Parkins: Can I tell you a secret about Christmas shopping?

---

Roast camel hump and calf brains in jelly: Gastronomic cooking, 1960s-style

---

He turned his bank, Anglo Irish Bank (and it was his bank in all but name) from being a bit-player financial services nobody into the third force in Irish banking, a €13 billion golden goose vying to overtake the big two, the Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Banks.

But behind the facade of stellar success was an unsustainable banking model and a semi-detached personal relationship with ethics that ultimately destroyed it, along with his career and his reputation. In the process, the country was engulfed in a banking disaster of epic proportions, destroying the lives, happiness and life savings of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people.

The property market collapsed, and with it the construction sector, prompting a return to mass emigration, economic austerity and lost years that were midwife to the current housing crisis.

Deserved or otherwise, it is undoubtedly true that following his fall from grace, FitzPatrick came to be loathed across society, including by people who hitherto cheered him on – whether they were regulators and auditors, who all failed in their duty to police what Anglo was doing, or ordinary people, seduced and dazzled by the notion that they too were experts on the merits of investing in apartments on the shores of the Black Sea, believing, with encouragement, that they too could ride the Celtic tiger’s credit-fuelled property boom.

Seán FitzPatrick was born in May 1948 and grew up in modest circumstances in Bray, Co Wicklow. His father was Michael FitzPatrick, a small-time dairy farmer; his mother Johanna (née Maher) was a civil servant. Seán was the second of two children, the elder being his sister Joyce, later a president of the National College of Ireland.

Seán was briefly a pupil at the local Loreto Convent before going to Presentation College, Bray, where he became a keen rugby player, a sport which he enjoyed well into adulthood, togging out regularly into his 40s for Bective Rangers.

In later years, he said one of his proudest moments in life was when, as “captain of the Presentation College Bray under-9 rugby team we beat Blackrock College”. He also liked swimming, which he did for the Bray’s Cove Club, and competed at galas in Greystones and Wicklow town.

He did not shine academically, achieving just one honours level Leaving Certificate result (in French) and a pass in mathematics. Nonetheless, he managed to scrape into University College Dublin with the aid of a matriculation and studied commerce.

His first job was as a funfair attendant in Bray but real adult employment came in 1969 when he joined accountants Reynolds McCarron & O’Connor as a trainee, and then Atkins Chirnside & Co, later part of PricewaterhouseCoopers, where one of his colleagues was Charlie McCreevy, later minister for finance and a European Commissioner.

In 1974, aged 26 and qualified as a chartered accountant, he joined the Irish Bank of Commerce, an operation with just four employees. It took over the City of Dublin Bank which, in 1978, in turn acquired another small operation, Anglo Irish Bank, founded in 1963 but which remained a tiny operation controlled largely by a family named Kennedy in Manchester.

In 1980, at the age of just 32, FitzPatrick became general manager of the resultant three-banks-in-one, then trading as the single entity City of Dublin Bank. Despite inherited losses at Anglo of more than IR£300,000, in 1980 the new operation turned a profit of IR£100,000.

In 1986, it was rebranded as the Anglo Irish Banking Corporation and FitzPatrick, general manager up to that point, was made chief executive officer.

The success that followed owed much to FitzPatrick’s personal charisma. In a just published memoir, See-Saw, a painfully honest account by Fintan Drury, former Anglo board member and erstwhile friend of FitzPatrick, the author acknowledges his own failings as an independent director and describes falling under the banker’s spell.

“I remember the first meeting,” Drury writes, “his warmth, speed of thought, charm, all wrapped up in a physical presence that, in spite of his short stature, allowed him to dominate the room, any room . . . this was different to anything I had previously known, certainly in business. He had eyes that engaged you, hands that worked the air as if conducting the rhythm of his dialogue and he was very tactile, an unusual feature for Irish men of that vintage.”

According to Drury, no one believed in FitzPatrick – Seánie to his friends, Fitzy to some work colleagues – more than the man himself.

What followed his elevation to chief executive was a period of frenetic activity during which Anglo, eschewing normal retail banking, accessed money through international capital markets, as well as some direct acquisitions, and gave quick answers to borrowers – usually a yes – with most of the money relating to property.

The loans fuelled either developers or those buying what they built and soon, the other banks, their shareholders and directors jealous of Anglo’s success, followed suit. Politicians, particularly Fianna Fáil politicians, courted FitzPatrick and formed a sort of mutual admiration society.

“We were hungrier [than the other banks] and we had a very clear focus on how to get the business,” he told RTÉ’s Áine Lawlor. “The customer, when he came into us, he would deal with senior people and was able to get decisions fairly quickly because they were businesspeople.”

By 2007, the bank was valued at €13 billion. In a 2002 interview to mark his elevation as “Businessperson of the Year”, FitzPatrick gave a telling inkling as to his motivation.

“My late mother in particular,” he told Business and Finance magazine, “ingrained in us that we had to keep striving and that enough was never enough.”

But regulation, the rules supposed to protect the public interest as opposed to shielding vested interests, had gone too far, he argued in June 2007. Speaking at a business lunch hosted in Dublin by Experian, a financial services company, he railed against restraints, saying: “those who influence the environment within which we trade seem determined to exert much stricter control on us”.

He continued: “Have we reached a situation where the weight of compliance with the various financial reporting standards and other corporate regulations is now so heavy that entrepreneurs are no longer willing to bear it? . . .

“Among the more insidious aspects of the current regulatory environment is its apparent presumption of guilt on the part of entrepreneurs and businesspeople generally.

“The whole structure seems to be geared towards something akin to an annual proof of innocence statement. This is corporate ‘McCarthyism’ and we shouldn’t tolerate it.”

In reality, a major factor in the looming crash was the lack of regulatory compliance and, critically, enforcement. In the 2008-2009 crisis, as property values collapsed in America, pulling down banks with them, Anglo’s loans, and the assets that underpinned them, became worthless.

In the face of looming catastrophe, the banks, developers and, most damning of all, the financial regulator, donned green jerseys and voiced the wisdom and analytical skills of the Wall Street shoe shine boy – the fundamentals were sound; the banks were well capitalised, as FitzPatrick himself said in an infamous interview with Marian Finucane in October 2008.

Speaking days after the government guaranteed bank deposits, thereby placing all associate risks onto the taxpayer, the broadcaster sought the banker’s reaction.

“The cause of our problem was global, so I can’t say ‘sorry’ with any kind of sincerity,” he said, before adding: “But I do say a very genuine thank you” [for the bank guarantee].

Later that same day, he gave a speech urging the government, to tackle the, as he put it, sacred cows of the budget – universal child benefit, State pensions and medical cards for the over 70s.

Two months later, he was gone, exposed inside Anglo as a liar and a cheat. For eight years, on the eve of auditor’s annual examination of the bank’s books, he had transferred some €87 million in personal loans out of the bank and into the Irish Nationwide Building Society, thereby hoodwinking the accountants as to the true picture of Anglo’s balance sheet.

“We were to learn years later,” writes Drury, “that this practice was neither illegal nor contrary to accounting rules but it was a breach of trust. It meant that every year we signed off on accounts which, as CEO and later chairman, he knew did not accurately report the directors’ loans. The realisation was stark; the very person that we and every shareholder regarded as the bank’s leader was involved in an accounting sleight of hand that would have done credit to the wiliest card shark at the table.”

In January 2009, Anglo was nationalised at a cost to the taxpayer of €29 billion. FitzPatrick himself went bankrupt in 2010 with personal debts of some €100 million. His private investments included a casino in Macau.

While several criminal trials saw several bank executives convicted, including David Drumm, FitzPatrick’s successor as Anglo chief executive, FitzPatrick himself escaped judicial sanction.

He faced three trials (one a retrial) – the first relating to the so-called Maple 10, an illegal share support operation to prop up Anglo’s supposed value; the second relating to his own loan concealment.

In the first, he was acquitted but others were not. In the second, which required the retrial, he was acquitted in May 2017, on the directions of the judge, who ruled that the investigation into him was flawed.

It was, FitzPatrick said outside court, a free and innocent man, “a wonderful day”.

He was, however, expelled from the Institute of Chartered Accountants and agreed never to apply for readmission.

By then a somewhat elusive figure, FitzPatrick shrank from public view, living mainly at his long-time family home, a 1970s house on Whitshed Road in Greystones, not a period mansion in a gated community as was sometimes erroneously stated.

A toxic figure to many, he was a lightning-rod for the idea that wider society had been betrayed by a greedy and reckless elite whose actions destroyed the lives of others.

Out of the limelight, he was rarely seen around the Wicklow commuter town. He played a lot of golf, much of it at Druids Glen Club near Greystones. To the end, he declined to accept responsibility for his role in what had happened.

A strong bond of mutual loyalty existed between him and a knot of close friends, some who came from his school days, others who were among Anglo’s more wealthy clients, several of whom felt he bore a disproportionate burden for the crash.

“He maintained his friendships with people he went to school with,” says one man associated with his earlier years. “He was generous with his time and his money. I know of two or three guys he got jobs for and helped on their way. He stood by people he went to school with.”

That bond was to be burnished at a celebratory Pres Bray 100th anniversary foundation dinner in the Glenview Hotel on November 5th. But Seán FitzPatrick, due to dine with a table of old pals, did not make it. He suffered a heart attack the night before and died last Monday.

He is survived by his wife Catríona (née O’Toole), known to all as Tríona, their children, Jonathan, David and Sarah, two daughters-in-law, four grandchildren, and his sister Joyce O’Connor.