The former chief executive of the Anglo Irish Bank, which was at the centre of the country’s economic crash, is facing 33 criminal charges, court filings in the US have revealed.
Details of the case against David Drumm were made public by a Boston court before an extradition hearing on Tuesday. They show 33 separate arrest warrants were issued by a judge in Dublin in June 2013 for a range of alleged crimes including forgery and conspiracy to defraud.
He is also accused of a number of offences relating to “unlawful financial assistance” to a person or company in connection with the purchase of shares and false accounting. The alleged offences carry sentences of between five years and life imprisonment.
Drumm, 48, who has been living in the US for the past six years, was arrested by US Marshals on Saturday acting on an extradition warrant.
Anglo Irish was Ireland’s third-biggest bank and its collapse forced the government to nationalise it in 2009.
Drumm became chief executive of Anglo Irish in 2005, succeeding Seán FitzPatrick, and was at the helm in September 2008 when the government issued a bank guarantee in an attempt to reverse the debt crisis threatening several financial institutions.
Anglo, which was one of the main lenders to property developers, was losing up to €1bn a day at the time and was widely seen as the catalyst for Ireland’s banking collapse and consequent bailout by the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the EU in 2010.
Drumm resigned from the bank in December 2008 and six months later he had moved to a wealthy Boston suburb.
The court filings show the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority filed a complaint with the Garda Síochána alleging a number of malpractices within Anglo in February 2009. “In the course of the investigation, Drumm was implicated in the alleged malpractices,” the document says.
