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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

Niall O'Dowd and Molly Muldoon,

Published Saturday, November 26, 2011, 10:00 PM

Updated Friday, December 9, 2011, 3:05 PM

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David Drumm

DAVID DRUMM PHOTO GALLERY

The interview with David Drumm took place over two hours in his lawyer’s offices in Midtown Manhattan in mid-November.

Ironically, the venue was only blocks away from the former headquarters of Lehmann Brothers, whose collapse in 2008 led to the ever-spiraling economic disaster we are still undergoing.

Until Lehmann’s collapse, David Drumm was convinced that Anglo Irish would survive the downturn that had become manifest in the Irish property market.

After Lehmann, the world shifted axis and the collapse inexorably began. It is a period Drumm recalls with great lucidity.

He says he felt he was part of team Ireland, trying to salvage Anglo and the Irish banking system. He says the lesson of the Lehman collapse was that it was a mistake to let it fail.

He believed all the major decision makers from the Taoiseach on down were fundamentally motivated by a belief it would be an equally fatal error to let any Irish bank fail.

Decisions were made in that frenetic period that will haunt the Irish for decades to come.

The decisions made will certainly haunt David Drumm.

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He believes in terms of Anglo, every decision, including the deeply controversial Maple Ten funding to buy up Sean Quinn’s shares, was known about and approved at the very highest levels of the Irish government.

“Everyone was on the same team back then, then came the scattering match” is how he puts it.

Drumm admits to waking up depressed many days and to wondering when the relentless spotlight will shift away from him and his family and why so many of the actors who made those fateful decisions have faded to quiet obscurity while he is still a choice target.

He firmly believes he was no better or no worse than most of the participants during that hectic time, that he acted in good faith and he has been unfairly targeted when others were just as culpable.

Once he was Anglo’s swashbuckling CEO, driving profits ever higher at the bank then memorably described as the best in the world.

He still calls himself an Anglo man, who rose the currents to power at the bank that was the envy of its competitors.

Now that same bank is pursuing him Javert-like through complicated bankruptcy procedures in Boston, for what he claims he does not have as he has offered them everything, including his pension, to pay off the loans he took.

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nosoupforU | Nov 29, 2011, 03:05 AM EST

Anglo didn't destroy Ireland. The Irish Goverment did.

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stanJames | Nov 29, 2011, 01:29 AM EST

TODufaigh - you miss hte extent of the scandal. These criminals have not just destroyed our Irish economy. Almost every nation in Europe and the USA is suffering terribly. Greece, Italy, etc come to mind I'm not very religious but there are a few good things int he bible. Jesus upset the tables of the money lenders at th temple gates The love of money (or is it lust) is the root of all evil. the best message we could send in the USA is to seize some big banks HQ, get the people and records out of it, And send the the specialists in controlled demolition. And leave the mess standing forever - as a message to the next criminals to be. A far more noticeable solution then trying to keep up in slow govt with the next super wealthy capitalist scam.

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RedBranch | Nov 28, 2011, 01:52 PM EST

Thanks Citizen, there's light in your pronouncements. Hard to believe that there will any large 'capital inflows' for the forseeable future, but you never know with those Chinese et al. It seems totally insane to be putting thousands of mortgage defaulters out on the street while tens of thousands of homes lie empty. One thing we need is leadership.

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CaptainCon | Nov 28, 2011, 11:19 AM EST

If everything around Anglo was so kosher why is Patrick Neary who was Financial Regulator for the banks still in hiding?

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IrelandNorth | Nov 28, 2011, 07:27 AM EST

This confirms my worst suspicion that there may have been political collusion in the casino capiltalism of Anglo. It may also emplain a certain bureaucratic foot-dragging in Irish government circles. Whose implicated? Why should the electorates Confirmation money pay back such reckless debts

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TODufaigh | Nov 28, 2011, 12:41 AM EST

A meretricious, self-serving tissue of lies and half-truths from a man who stands for all that is most rotten about Celtic Tiger Ireland. And if anyone had any doubts, the post below from Simon J Kelly (look him up) shows that fatcats stick together. These criminals have destroyed an economy, a society and a country and left the 'little people' to pay for generations as well as forcing most of their children out of the country. I would like to see him tried, convicted and jailed. But in Ireland, Europe's Zimbabwe, that will never happen.

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PolinDeB | Nov 27, 2011, 07:45 PM EST

We need to punish them all, but Drumm is an idiot if he thinks he can complain... Anglo destroyed Ireland.. it was helped by the government but ultimately he made the decisions.. why did he think he was getting such pay.. and then he's doing dodgy loan deals.. I think if he wants to be honest he should be and tell everything.. then he will at least help the Irish people ... but I'm guessing he'll keep his mouth shut and let bertie and them use him as the whipping boy...

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CaptainCon | Nov 27, 2011, 04:35 PM EST

Nyberg's report was a whitewash commissioned by Brian Lenihan and carefully restricted to exclude the most telling element of the corrupt link between the Irish government and Anglo-Irish Bank- the bank guarantee itself when private losses were adopted on behalf of the Irish people by a wholly corrupt Irish government desperate to stave off a proper examination of that bank's books. Four years later and the Garda investigation is still trying to find a way to report but not blame anyone and find no evidence of criminality. The Nyberg report was a disgraceful attempt at a government inspired whitewash. We do not need to 'learn from' corruption- we need to prevent it and raise the stakes. How much 'moving on' is there from a loss of sovereignty which is the gravest offence against the state? We need to make sure the people involved in the Market Abuse which was the Maple 10 share ramping operation, the private loans handed out on a non-recourse basis to 'friends' in the Galway race tent and which effectively are a fraud on Anglo Irish shareholders and the back-to-back loans hidden and undeclared in statutory accounts declared to the Irish Stock Exchange as 'fair and true' are traced back to the senior officers of that bank. Letting them walk away is not an option likely to discourage such fraud in the future is it not? What kind of message does it send when all you have to do is run away abroad and whinge about a witchhunt while denying any personal responsibility. Drumm had a major hand in destroying Irish sovereignty and there are far worse sanctions for that than jailtime.

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cillowen | Nov 27, 2011, 04:29 PM EST

anglo man in more ways than one. as long as we have henry viii's pope elizabeth, close at hand, we have a ring to kiss and knighting honors bestowed on our (irish and irish american) achievers. Those who get giddy at the thought.

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Simonjkelly | Nov 27, 2011, 04:06 PM EST

David's story is spot on. Anybody who thinks that pinning the blame on a few bankers for Ireland's collapse is delusional. That is also the informed opinion of the official report carried out on the banking collapse by Nyberg. I screwed up like so many other Irish people and so did David. We need to learn from it and get over it. It is a which hunt. Aib will loose almost as much as Anglo, but I don't see the gov chasing those guys. There are winners and losers. Thats the nature of all things. We just need a system that accepts this rather than punished people who try and fail. The irish in Ireland need to learn from he Irish in America

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CitizenWhy | Nov 27, 2011, 03:22 PM EST

@RedBranch ... Ireland will not do anything proactive, such as setting up a system to monitor and restrict capital inflows; forming 2-3 new mutually owned (that is, owned by the customers) banks with the capital it is wasting on paying off the banks' debt (and hiring some Canadians and Swedes to run these new banks and train Irish natives in sound banking practices); reducing mortgage amounts owed and retail rents; selling off - very cheap - abandoned homes and apartments only to those who have lost their homes; publishing all meetings between politicians and bankers and requiring that the pols send a letter/email to their constituents stating why the meeting took place and what was discussed and how the pols will be following up. Some of these meetings with local bankers are quite legitimate, so this will not be an onerous task for honest pols. ... The big problem is that Ireland now needs EU/ECB/IMF money not just to pay off the foreign banks (through putting money continuously into the zombie Irish banks) but also to run its government budget and services. Any default on paying the banks will cut off this money. In brief, Ireland is literally being held hostage to the EU/ECB/IMF protection racket. ... Another problem is that Irish bankers appear not to know the fundamentals of how to operate a bank. hence the suggestion to get gopod bankers in from Sweden and Canada to teach these fundamentals to Irish trainees and bank professionals.

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roryobrien | Nov 27, 2011, 02:44 PM EST

So family man Dave was just following orders. Give me a break. The only pity is we cannot execute these people.

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mairdemalone | Nov 27, 2011, 01:56 PM EST

Dave Drumm's may be suffering hard times now, but he had his day in the sun, on three continents! Has he got his cash stashed away off shore? I'd say he has. Only the Irish Taxpayers out, lost money, lost homes, lost their lives, lost their dignity, lost their land, lost their families. Throughout the interview David, like everyone of his banking pals, put the blame on those in government, the very people without whose help he would not have been able to do what he did. Shame on him! There is not one modicum of shame in his tone. He is still arrogant! His his whinny "poor me" attitude stinks! Over six million Irish people are suffering because of him, his partners and his government cronies Those greedy raiders of the finances of the Working and Middle Classes should be sent to join Madoff! They were the ones who gave those other crooks: Land Developers the go ahead; or maybe it was the other way around. The Land Developers stormed through countries around the world, changed the landscape of counties, states, cities and rural areas (in their haste to waste the land, they outlawing the term "urban sprawl". So while they dug up farm lands and put down over-priced houses, with zero interest bank loans, loans handed out to people that the banks knew wouldn't be able to pay back the loans when the interest went up, CEO like David Drumm got hefty bonuses. -Thanks to Developers' Lobbyists in Washington, and in other seats of power, other government around the world, especially the Irish government, hand-picked government officials (I would not put it past them to take bribes) rushed through the building permits). So go ahead and suffer Dave! Learn to be HUMBLE! HUMILITY is, in the end, the great equalizer.

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RedBranch | Nov 27, 2011, 01:42 PM EST

Nice going Citizen! Any ideas how to extract ourselves from this predicament? Although a half cable length of hemp rope and a low branch would be one starting position.

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CitizenWhy | Nov 27, 2011, 12:48 PM EST

Comparing the Irish banking system to Lehman shows an incredible ignorance and incompetence. Lehman was a trading operation, known for deception, dealing in dodgy derivatives that technically could be sold anywhere in the world, thus in theory having a huge market for its goods. Anglo-Irish was a lending operation, borrowing capital from foreign banks to lend to dubious Irish real estate developers (but members of the cozy in-crowd that ruled Ireland). Any competent banker or government would have known that the huge capital inflows coming from foreign banks were much too large for the size of the Irish economy and the number of Irish consumers. Brazil, for instance, tightly limits capital inflows. ... Lehman was doomed. It could not be saved. Its fall was not a mistake. Ango-Irish could also have fallen, with the government using its capital to start a new bank with responsible lending rules. Instead, pushed by Tim Geithner, the government foolishly took on Anglo-Irish's enormous debts, a burden that will cripple the Irish economy for decades and force high rates of emigration of the young and skilled. ... It is true that some big German banks might have failed if Anglo-Irish collapsed and did not repay the German banks. That is why Geithner and the EU pushed the Irish government to take on the humongous debts run up by people like this man, either an incompetent too highly paid or an ignoramus too highly paid. But a member of the club. Bah!

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