Mobile phone costs: Cap charges for a single market
In September 2008 the former head of Anglo Irish Bank, David Drumm, made a phone call to fellow banker John Bowe in which he described officials of the Central Bank as a ‘shower of clowns.’
The reality is that it was he who and his colleagues who were the clowns in thinking they could get away with the biggest financial fraud in the history of the state.
It was his grotesque stupidity and arrogance that led Drumm to believe that it was acceptable to conspire with Anglo’s former Finance Director Willie McAteer and head of Capital Markets John Bowe, as well as Irish Life and Permanent’s then-CEO, Denis Casey, and others in a €7.2bn confidence trick on the markets during the financial crisis.
In July, 2016, McAteer was sentenced to three and a half years in jail while his Anglo colleague John Bowe was given a two year term for their part in the conspiracy. Casey was jailed for two years and nine months. Last year the Court of Appeal upheld the convictions of Bowe and Casey.
Up to now it has been the second-tier directors and managers at Anglo Irish Bank that faced the inside of a prison cell for their part in the multi-billion euro fraud.
Now, more than ten years on from the conspiracy they conducted, it is almost certain that the man in charge of it all will finally see a cell door slam behind him.
It is not before time.
