IT MUST have been a difficult few years for Jim Flavin of DCC and his colleagues who were involved in the sale of the company's shares in Fyffes in 2000, having been in receipt of inside information that would have led them to believe that the Fyffes shares were about to take a nosedive, writes VINCENT BROWNE.
They must have been anxious about the mammoth High Court case that went on endlessly, which they first won and then lost in the Supreme Court.
They must have been worried about the effect on their corporate and individual reputations of the outcome to all this.
All very stressful, and I am not acknowledging this in any derisive sense.
They might even have had worries, fleeting worries, about the long arm of the law coming to get them because, after all, insider dealing (which the Supreme Court found they engaged in) is a crime, with stiff penalties including jail sentences.
But the worries would indeed have been fleeting, because pillars of the corporate community, as all these high-flyers were/are, do not have to face the criminal courts.
The criminal courts are for the lesser mortals.
The high-flyers can be reasonably assured they can do as they will - within certain limits of course - that no gardaí will come storming into their homes in the early hours of the morning, handcuff them, ransack their houses for "evidence", and lead them away ignominiously in paddy-wagons, in front of their high-flying neighbours.
Even if they steal several million, even €40 million, even €80 million, by far the greatest theft in the history of the country.
For insider trading is theft. Thieving money from investors conned to buy shares that the vendor of the shares knows will depreciate in value within a short time, information that the purchasers of the shares could not possibly know.
It is because it is theft that it is a crime.
And this is what Jim Flavin and DCC did in 2000, making a "profit" in the process of €80 million.
Everyone interested in these matters knew at the time that this is what they did, because within six weeks of the sale of the DCC shares in Fyffes in early 2000, the Fyffes share price collapsed.
Only the most naive believed that it was entirely a coincidence that DCC sold its shares just before the collapse occurred.
And everyone interested knew full well that this was theft, was a crime and knew also that the law and order brigade would do nothing, the Garda would stand aside, Cab, the heralded crime-busters, would sit on its hands.
The "big boys" would get off, scot-free, at least as far as the criminal justice system was concerned.
Not a single politician has uttered a word even of concern over what has happened and over the indifference of the "authorities" to it all.
No ravings from the Fine Gael justice spokesperson, no motions of no-confidence in the Minister for Justice or the Garda, no demands for a tribunal of inquiry to find out what it is in our system that allowed the big boys to get away with stealing millions.
Remember the hullabaloo over the Northern Bank theft three years ago in Belfast, when £26.5 million was taken - about €40 million?
What was so different about that to what was done in this case, except that in this case the amount stolen was double the take in the Northern Bank theft?
And it wasn't just the DCC boys who were involved in the shenanigans at the time.
At the very same time the directors of Fyffes (a) acquiesced with Jim Flavin in the sale of the DCC shares; (b) they failed to issue a profit warning to alert all would-be purchasers of shares in Fyffes that there was bad news on the way about Fyffes trading performance and (c) they themselves went on what are called "roadshows" around the world, telling people what a great company Fyffes was and why everyone should buy shares in the company.
Not a word about the bad times, not just ahead but right then, when they were urging unsuspecting investors to invest in the company and keep up the share price.
And those distinguished citizens need have had no anxiety that the long arm of the law or the short arm of the law would touch them for they are big boys, high-flyers.
The criminal law is for the low-life types.
Yes, all of them must have suffered anxiety over the years that these matters were going through the courts or about to do so, but nothing like the anxiety of people caught in a little social welfare fraud, who know they are going to jail.