Co Dublin businessman Robert Francis Stapleton, wanted in England in connection with €7-million fraud charges, was freed on bail by the High Court in Dublin yesterday to await an extradition hearing on October 4th.
Mr Stapleton, managing director of software companies Fourth Millennium Ltd and Atect Business Services Ltd, was told he would have to post €50,000 cash, surrender his passport and sign on Monday to Friday at Crumlin Garda station, Dublin.
Mr Justice Barry White said that, while there may have been a history of Mr Stapleton moving to other countries and avoiding any voluntary return to Britain, there had been no suggestion he had fled to this jurisdiction knowing Lincolnshire police wanted to question him about the alleged frauds.
The judge said there was no State objection in principle to bail and Det Sgt Martin O'Neill had been extremely frank in his evidence that he had no difficulty in finding Mr Stapleton and arresting him at his home in Rathcoole, Co Dublin.
Mr Stapleton had been remanded in custody on foot of a European arrest warrant which alleged that he, with Julia Stapleton, committed fraudulent accounting totalling more than £5 million sterling in connection with a number of leisure companies he owned in Lincolnshire during the 1970s and 1980s.
Sgt O'Neill told Patrick McGrath, counsel for the State, that the alleged offences on the arrest warrant dated back to between 1978 and 1982. He had arrested him when Mr Stapleton declined to surrender voluntarily to Lincolnshire police.
Sgt O'Neill said Mr Stapleton was alleged to have master-minded a pyramid fraud of £5 million, of which £3 million was still not recovered. He would borrow from a bank and then borrow a greater amount to pay off the loan while increasing his indebtedness. His wife, Julia, and an accountant attached to his English companies had been charged in relation to the fraud and each had been sentenced to two-year suspended terms in British courts.