ODCE appears at committee: Watchdog’s role in trials in spotlight
Efforts by the State’s corporate law watchdog to cast blame beyond its office for the collapse of the criminal trial of former Anglo Irish Bank chairman Seán FitzPatrick has a taint of self-justification about it.
According to Ian Drennan, the head of the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement, who appeared before an Oireachtas committee yesterday, factors which contributed to the collapse of Mr FitzPatrick’s trial “extend well beyond the failures that occurred within the ODCE”.
In a letter to the Oireachtas business, enterprise, and innovation committee, Mr Drennan complains that he has become “the personification” of all that went wrong with the investigation and prosecution and argues that he is not wholly to blame.
That may well be so but, whether solely blameworthy or not, the buck in relation to the handling by the ODCE of one of the longest trials in the history of the State has to stop with him.
It is not as if he was a junior adviser to government with little experience. Indeed when then jobs and enterprise minister Richard Bruton appointed him in 2012 to succeed Paul Appleby, he spoke warmly of him and said he brought with him a “wealth of experience”, having served as the CEO of the Irish Auditing and Accounting Supervisory Authority for the previous eight years.
Neither he nor the ODCE’s legal adviser, Kevin O’Connell, can escape blame for the spectacular collapse of the trial of Mr FitzPatrick in 2017.
His first trial collapsed in 2015, weeks after Mr O’Connell, then legal adviser to the ODCE, admitted to shredding a number of potentially relevant documentary files in a “panic”.
The second trial ended when Judge John Aylmer directed that Mr FitzPatrick be found not guilty.
Giving his ruling, he criticised the ODCE for failing to conduct impartial investigations, for coaching witnesses, and destroying evidence which may have been exculpatory.
Speaking on RTÉ radio yesterday prior to the committee hearing, the chairwoman of the Oireachtas business, enterprise, and innovation committee, Fianna Fáil TD Mary Butler, said it is important to learn from mistakes of the past.
It is even more important, though, to avoid mistakes in the future. In 2017, after the trial collapsed, former tánaiste and justice minister Frances Fitzgerald described the ODCE as “not fit for purpose”.
Yet, two years on, instead of being disbanded, the same State enterprise is about to be given more powers that will allow it morph into what Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has described as “an Irish version of the FBI when it comes to white collar crime”.
While the ODCE has done a lot of worthwhile work in corporate enforcement, its handling of criminal trials has been mixed.
Some ex-Anglo executives, such William McAteer and Patrick Whelan, were convicted of breaching the Companies Acts, while others, like Mr FitzPatrick, were acquitted.
Mr Varadkar clearly retains faith in the ODCE and in Mr Drennan. Let us hope for all our sakes that it is not misplaced.
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