Anglo sentencing: ‘Honesty and integrity were sorely lacking’

Judge Martin Nolan was more than 15 minutes into his remarks – delivered in a low voice, without a script – when he confirmed, as if in passing, that all three former bankers would be going to jail.

Willie McAteer, sitting a few feet away in the dock, glanced at the judge for the first and only time. Beside him, an inscrutable John Bowe stared at his feet. Denis Casey, sitting at an angle to the two ex-Anglo men, his paperback copy of Game of Thrones at his side, did not react either.

It was a subdued morning in Court Number Nine, as if the tension had been sucked out of the place as an exceptionally long trial that began in the depths of winter staggered towards a conclusion on the last day before the courts’ summer holiday.

By the time Judge Nolan asked each of the three men to stand to receive their sentences – between 2-3½ years, with no time suspended – it elicited barely a murmur.

For almost 90 days, stretching back to January, the court had pored over the minutiae of high finance and the finer points of corporate law, excavating an eight-year-old trail of paperwork that chronicled the spectacular collapse of Anglo Irish Bank.

But notwithstanding the mass of material and dramatis personae it encompassed, the Anglo trial, like others before it, was haunted by its absentees.

In a speech that was short but notable for its clarity, Judge Nolan adverted to some of these absentees. He was “very much aware”, the judge said, of the “involvement, or non-involvement” of the State authorities, who had turned a blind eye to “optically driven balance sheet management” – a euphemism for falsifying financial records. He was also “very much aware” that Casey had become involved with Anglo as a result of the “green jersey agenda”. The trial had heard that Casey got involved after being told by the financial regulator that Irish banks needed to “don the green jersey” and help each other out during the global credit crunch.

During the trial, in the absence of the jury, Judge Nolan had said it was not a defence for the accused men that they believed the authorities had encouraged them in their actions. A crime committed while wearing a green jersey is still a crime.

He also ruled that the actions of the regulator and the Central Bank did not amount to "entrapment" as that had to include an intention to prosecute. Yet the "green jersey agenda" – a tacit, secret understanding that Irish institutions would help out their compatriot-banks – never sat easily.

Previous trial

Here there were echoes of Judge Nolan’s sentencing hearing in a previous Anglo-related trial, in 2014. On that occasion, the judge said it would be unjust to imprison two former directors at the bank – including, as it happened, McAteer – given that the financial regulator gave the “green light” to the illegal share-buying scheme at the centre of that trial. On that occasion, in 2014, Judge Nolan delivered an excoriating critique of the regulator’s office. “It would be most unjust to jail these two men when I feel that a State agency had led the two men into error and illegality,” he said.

On both occasions, in the 2014 and 2016 trials, the judge indicated that the attitude of the regulator and the Central Bank, while not a defence, might serve as mitigation in sentencing. The actions of the State may not have saved the three bankers from jail yesterday, but it probably does mean they will spend less time locked up than they otherwise might have. And there then were the auditors. It “beggared belief” that Ernst & Young had signed off on Anglo’s end-of-year accounts after the execution of the €7.2 billion manoeuvre devised by the bank to disguise the extent of its sickliness in mid-2008.

“They should have known what was occurring if they were doing their job properly,” the judge said of the auditors. He wondered whether it was a case of “blindness or wilful blindness”.

Who gained and who lost as a result of the back-to-back loan scheme? As Judge Nolan pointed out, the three bankers had not profited from the scheme and had acted in what they believed to be the best interests of their companies. But he made a point of stressing what he saw as the wider social cost of their actions; namely, the loss of public trust in important institutions. In this case, the judge remarked, two “blue-chip companies” had conspired together to manipulate public accounts. They were not duping mere abstract corporate entities, but the individual depositors and small investors who took this information in good faith and made important life decisions based on it. He mentioned elderly people investing their nest eggs.

“They are entitled to rely on honesty and integrity. In this case honesty and integrity were sorely lacking,” he said.

It was all over within 20 minutes. The three ex-bankers glanced towards their families before being escorted out a side door. A lift would bring them down to the basement, from where the prison vans depart.