TWO MAJOR Garda files related to investigations into Anglo Irish Bank will be sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions today, Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern has said.
Mr Ahern said yesterday that following what was probably the biggest investigation of its kind in the history of the State, gardaí were confident there would be prosecutions.
Garda sources have said it could take “weeks if not months” for the DPP to review them before any prosecutions can be brought.
The largest file to be sent to the DPP related to the €7.2 billion back-to-back financial transactions carried out between Anglo Irish and Irish Life and Permanent.
The funding arrangements between the two banks, which involved transferring money from ILP to Anglo, flattered Anglo’s balance sheet at the end of September 2008 and masked heavy withdrawals of customer deposits at the peak of the financial crisis.
The Minister said the file contained 42 volumes of documents that concerned the transfer of the money, market manipulation and deception. Four major suspects were involved, he said, but he could not name them for legal reasons.
The second file sent to the DPP, which had six volumes, was related to the so-called Maple 10, the Minister said, and the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement would also send in a file on the same matter. The Maple 10 were 10 customers of the bank who took a 10 per cent stake in Anglo, using loans from the bank.
There were also a number of relatively smaller aspects still under investigation that would continue into the new year, Mr Ahern said. These related to market manipulation, loans to directors and transactions not properly notified to the Financial Regulator. He said the preparation of the files involved “probably the biggest investigation” gardaí had ever undertaken in the State. Some 115,000 e-mails had been examined and 400 statements had been taken, 72 of which had been major and had run to between 100 and 150 pages. It had not been an easy investigation, he said and was unusual given that it dealt with aspects of both criminal and corporate law.
Mr Ahern said two senior legal counsel and a junior counsel had been brought in to help gardaí to prepare the files and ensure the documentation facilitated a “relatively quick turnaround”. Though it was up to the DPP to decide if prosecutions would follow, he said, gardaí were happy with the progress they had made in the cases and confident prosecutions would follow.
The Minister said that issues related to encryption of files and obtaining passwords to access some protected documents had been resolved. It wasn’t a problem in the end, he said, and gardaí managed to obtain what they needed with co-operation and without it.
According to Garda sources, the Anglo files will still need to be reviewed for “weeks if not months” by the DPP, who is out of the country at present, before he decides if the people at the centre of the investigations have criminal cases to answer and if sufficient evidence exists to ground those prosecutions.
“This is something that will take a while and the DPP will probably come back to us as the files are examined and look for additional bits of information or evidence, or further proofs as it is known, on parts of the case,” said one source.
Another source said while it was impossible to say how long the files would be with the DPP before decisions on charges are made, he did not expect any decisions until February at the earliest.