BOSTON (AP) — Court documents unsealed Tuesday show that Ireland hopes to prosecute the disgraced former chief executive of Anglo Irish Bank for 33 counts of fraud, forgery and other crimes if he is extradited from Boston to Dublin.
The disclosure, reflecting six years of Irish police and corporate fraud investigations into David Drumm, came days after his arrest in his luxury Massachusetts home and hours ahead of his appearance in a Boston court to face an extradition warrant. If returned to Ireland and convicted of the most serious charges, the warrant said Drumm, 48, could face “an unlimited term of imprisonment.”
Anglo was the failed institution at the heart of Ireland’s 2008-13 financial crisis. It was the most aggressive lender during Ireland’s decade-long construction boom, gambling borrowed tens of billions on continued runaway growth in property values at home and abroad.
By early 2009, the government nationalized Anglo and its toxic property portfolio at an ultimate estimated cost to Irish taxpayers of $34 billion – a bill so large it overwhelmed Ireland’s ability to finance itself and led to a humiliating 2010 bailout. Ireland dissolved Anglo in 2011 and still is trying to sell many of the half-built property assets funded by the bank.
Drumm and his wife fled to the United States in 2009, bought a 4,000- square-foot, $2 million home in the upscale Boston suburb of Wellesley, then filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection in a bid to avoid repaying $9.7 million in Anglo personal loans. Drumm argued the home was his wife’s, not his.
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