Former chairman of Anglo Irish Bank Seán FitzPatrick dies aged 73

Mr Fitzpatrick died on Monday night, aged 73. 

The former banker suffered a cardiac arrest last week and was rushed to hospital.

He is survived by his wife Triona and the couple’s three adult children, David, Jonathan and Sarah.

Mr FitzPatrick became a figure of controversy and derision in political circles following the collapse of Anglo-Irish Bank and the State Bank Guarantee in 2008.

Anglo Irish Bank

The bank Mr FitzPatrick helped create - first as chief executive during the notorious boom years and then as chairman until its nationalisation in 2009 - will indelibly be linked to Ireland’s banking and property crash that helped bankrupt the State and ushered in an era of unemployment and emigration.

Mr FitzPatrick has long been characterised as public enemy no 1 of Ireland’s disastrous banking crash.

Anglo was nationalised in January 2009, and was subsequently merged with another dead bank, Irish Nationwide and renamed as the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation. The IBRC was liquidated in 2013.

But Ireland had already sunk around €30bn into Anglo, accounting for about half of all the money Irish taxpayers were forced to inject into the banking system during the worst financial crisis for the State.

All the major banks at the time, including AIB, Bank of Ireland, and Irish Life & Permanent, needed to be bailed out to keep their doors open at huge costs to Irish taxpayers.

Anglo nonetheless will be forever linked to the crash because it was a bank that specialised in lending to property developers and played an outsized role in recklessly lending huge sums to small groups of property developers and businessmen.

First as chief executive from 1986, and then as chairman from 1995, Mr FitzPatrick built Anglo into the bank that was the main lender to commercial property developers.

It had only a small handful of branches in Ireland and overseas but had stated its ambitions even as it hurtled into disaster to grow and dwarf conventional general lenders like AIB and Bank of Ireland and to become the largest commercial real estate lender in Europe.

Anglo around the world became a byword for reckless lending during the boom. Some of the bank’s leading managers were found guilty of criminal activities in their attempts to hide its financial troubles as the crisis deepened, at the onset of the global financial crash in 2008.

The sums involved in Ireland recapitalising the banking system were so enormous that the international debt markets lost trust in Ireland’s ability to refinance its sovereign debts.

In late 2010, the government was forced to go to the troika of the EU, ECB and IMF for a humiliating €67bn sovereign bailout.

The troika prescribed austerity which led to recession and unemployment eventually surged to over 18%.

Ireland was also told to repay the private bond debts of banks like Anglo. The mishandling of the crisis by the ECB and others in the early years almost led to the expulsion of Ireland and other bailed-out European nations from the single currency.

In April 2014, at the start of the first of several trials over many years of prominent Anglo and other bankers, Judge Martin Nolan said jurors must leave at the courtroom door any prejudices they held against bankers for the country's debt "calamity”.

During the trial, Judge Nolan had referred to Anglo as "probably the most famous, and some would say infamous, bank in this country."

At the 2016 trial, Mr FitzPatrick was acquitted of all charges that he had provided "unlawful financial assistance" in July 2008 to a group of long-standing customers, known as the Maple 10, to buy shares in Anglo.

In 2017, Mr FitzPatrick was also acquitted of charges of hiding loans from auditors.

Back in 2003, Mr FitzPatrick was the highest paid of any Irish stock exchange company at €1.8m, which included a €1.2m performance bonus.

He had tapped millions in loans from Anglo and built an investment portfolio around the world, including a casino in Macau.

He was declared bankrupt in 2010 with debts of €147m but continued to live in an upmarket area of Greystones in Co Wicklow.

In an interview as he prepared to step down as chief executive in 2003, Mr FitzPatrick said he wanted to step down from running the bank on a day-to-day basis and talked of his contribution to building Anglo.

“This is going to sound very arrogant but I don’t mean it that way. Who is going to replace Alex Ferguson? And I do believe there are better managers around than Alex Ferguson. The board has got to be brave,” he said.

He was subsequently appointed chairman of Anglo until its nationalisation in 2009.

'Economic treason'

'Seánie', became an emblem for the light-touch, often no-touch regulation which existed under Fianna Fáil during the Celtic Tiger years.

Then Taoiseach Brian Cowen was accused by then Labour leader Eamon Gilmore of committing economic treason under privilege in the Dáil after revelations emerged of a golf game between the two men months before the guarantee was extended.

In 2010, following the publication of a book by journalists Tom Lyons and Brian Carey, Mr Gilmore attacked Mr Cowen for exposing the State to picking up the tab of a “rotten bank."

"If the Taoiseach's Government knew Anglo Irish Bank was insolvent and he asked the Irish taxpayer to bail it out and to pay the cost we are now paying for it, that was and is economic treason," he said in a highly charged atmosphere in the Dáil.

Mr Gilmore made the comments during Leaders' Questions where he quizzed the Taoiseach about contacts he had with Mr FitzPatrick.

"First, did the Taoiseach discuss the bank's business at the dinner or the golf outing? Second, will he put on the record of the house all of his contacts with Anglo Irish Bank between the beginning of 2008 and the time of its nationalisation?

"Is the bottom line not that the government provided a bail-out, a guarantee, to a bust bank and that the people must now pay for this through reduced incomes and social welfare payments, additional taxes, a loss of business and the economic problem with which they are trying to cope?"

At the 2015 Banking Inquiry, Mr Cowen said he regretted the round of golf with Anglo boss Sean FitzPatrick "if only for the optics."

The controversial game took place in Druids Glen on July 23, 2008, just months after a catastrophic collapse of Anglo Irish Bank shares.

Mr Cowen played with Mr FitzPatrick and his long-term friend Fintan Drury, a former Anglo director. Later the trio joined Alan Gray, a director of the Central Bank, Gary McGann, a director of Anglo, and Mr Cowen's driver for dinner at the golf club.

Mr Cowen described the game as "unfortunate from an optical point of view."

"Yes, I'd rather it didn't happen," he told the Banking Inquiry.

When Deputy Kieran O'Donnell asked him if he had shown poor judgement in taking part, Mr Cowen responded that there was nothing wrong with what he did.

"I didn't do anything inappropriate or untoward. If people want to set it up that something happened, I can't do anything about it," he said.

Several Deputies questioned Mr Cowen about that golf outing. Deputy Pearse Doherty asked if the former Taoiseach knew that it was mainly Anglo individuals who would be present.

"It didn't occur to me much really," he said.

Mr Cowen said he had asked Fintan Drury to get some people together to discuss the economy which was clearly slowing down. He insisted there had been no discussion during the day about banking and "this is the truth. It was about economic issues". 

He told Deputy Joe Higgins that the conversation had focussed on discussing economic challenges.