David Drumm: ‘There is a witch hunt ... I convince myself that this will pass’

An Irish Central exclusive interview with the former Anglo Irish Bank boss now in US

The bank was a causality of that, not out of recklessness but because we did have a correction in Ireland, as every bank was going to have. We ran out of cash because the international money markets that couldn’t lend us enough, stopped lending us any and that is what happened in 2008. When confidence goes in a bank, it’s over and the year 2008, I focus on 2008 because it was not a problem in 2007. When the confidence goes in a bank, your entire balance sheet relies on lenders, international banking lenders, lending to you and that that goes, it’s over. That was not just the problem for Anglo, it was the problem for Allied Irish Bank, for Bank of Ireland, for the other banks and ergo a problem for the State, because it had to protect it’s banking system, everybody was working together to that.

Now what’s happened after that, when we move into 2009 was Ireland made some decisions, which really have come back to blight us.

One of them was transferring assets from the banking system into NAMA and marking all of the assets to market. Recognizing losses that no other country did, here in the U.S they have just more experience and they had seen this before, no bank was forced to mark all its assets down at a time when you couldn’t sell anything. The UK didn’t do it, nobody in Europe did it, so Ireland stood alone and by marking this thing down Ireland separated itself down.

Now the cost to me, personally because I was a member of the Anglo team, was Anglo’s loss were marked down by that transfer to Nama in 2009. A great way to juxtaposition that is if you look at the sale of the U.S. loan book of the bank, they got more than 80 percent on the dollar.

NOD: What are they getting on NAMA?

DD: They marked it down by 60 percent, who knows what they will get. But that was artificial, a state owned bank, selling assets to a state owned entity at a price that they made up.

NOD: Let me ask you about David Drumm and Sean Fitzpatrick,  On theory is that you were a young guy, who was  plucked from relative obscurity, and  made CEO right as the ship began to sink and that FitzPatrick did that very deliberately.

DD: Sean was a very, very powerful person; he was a controlling person not just of the executives, but of the non-executives. He ran the board, in a highly premeditated, controlled manner there were meeting before board meetings to make sure he got what he wanted and so on. Sean was like that before I became CEO, he was 18-years as CEO and he wasn’t planning on changing. So as chairman he was an executive chairman for all intents and purposes and a highly controlling one, there is no doubt in that. Anyone that knows him, knows that is true.

NOD: Do you feel in any way that you were brought into that job, because you were the least experienced of the people applying for it and that he was then able to control you?

DD: I am pretty sure I was his candidate, he thought I could do the job, I worked for the bank for many years and done a lot of good things in the bank for many years but as the youngest person there, I was the likely person who would give the least resistance. I think that is true.

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Nster.com