Willie McAteer – found guilty.
DONEGAL TD Pearse Doherty TD has welcomed the guilty findings by the jury in the trial of former Anglo directors John Bowe and Willie Mc Ateer.
McAteer is originally from Rathmullan.
Anglo’s former head of Capital Markets Bowe and the bank’s former finance director, McAteer, had denied conspiring with former Irish Life and Permanent executives, Denis Casey and Peter Fitzpatrick and others to mislead depositors, lenders and investors by making Anglo’s corporate deposits look larger than they were.
The jury took almost 38 hours over nine days to reach its unanimous verdicts.
McAteer and Bowe were remanded on continuing bail until Friday.
The jurors will resume deliberations in relation to Mr Casey and Mr Fitzpatrick tomorrow morning.
The court heard that in September 2008, Anglo Irish Bank was due to finalise its end of year figures.
The financial crisis had affected bank’s ability to get funding.
Deputy Doherty said that the two convictions on a single charge, after so many years since the banking crash, showed the weakness of the state’s stance on white collar crime.
Deputy Doherty said: “These convictions are a good start but they are also long overdue. The damage caused by the fraud of which these men have been found guilty, and their roles with Anglo, is still being felt by every Irish worker in their pay cheque and every Irish patient in a hospital in this country. It is infuriating that we have had to wait nearly decade since the banking crash for these convictions to be handed down.
“We know that the culture in Irish banking was corrupt and reckless at the time. Billions of the people’s money was squandered and wasted yet the vast majority of those incidents aren’t illegal even to this day- reckless lending being a case in point.
“It is time to create a genuine system that does not tolerate reckless lending and takes white collar crime seriously. It should not be treated as a victimless crime. It is incredible that in so many cases white collar crime is still treated as not even being a crime at all.”
