A senior executive at the bank that brought about the collapse of the Celtic Tiger has been granted immunity from prosecution by the Irish judicial service.

The Irish Times reveals that Matt Moran, Anglo Irish Bank’s chief financial officer at the time of the crash, was granted immunity by the Director of Public Prosecutions about two years ago.
Moran was a key figure at Anglo when the bank was nationalised in 2009.

The bank’s collapse is now the subject of a criminal investigation with three former bankers set to face trial next year.

Moran and his Dublin-based solicitors did not respond to calls and emails to their offices from the Irish Times.

The DPP would not answer any questions from the paper as to why the immunity deal had been granted.

A spokeswoman for the DPP said: “This office does not comment on individual cases. I would add that the case is of course pending before the courts and due for trial in January 2014.”

The report says that Moran was the second most senior financial officer at Anglo Irish Bank.
When the state took over the bank in 2009. Moran was promoted to the role of director of group finance before he left the bank later that year.

The paper says Moran never served as a director of the board of the bank and was best known for his ‘investor relations’ role, dealing with shareholders, banking analysts at stockbrokers and the media.

He was a key member of the management team led by chief executive David Drumm after he took up the role of chief financial officer in 2004.

The report adds that during 2008 he led the bank’s ultimately unsuccessful campaign to counteract the negative comment about the bank in the financial community as investors started to bet against the bank’s share price.

In recent years he has been working in Luxembourg as chief executive of Lombard International Assurance, which offers investments to wealthy clients.

The Mayo native featured in the recently published Anglo Tapes recordings of conversations between Anglo executives in 2008 as bank executives struggled to deal with a run on deposits and attempted to deal with the destabilising effect of businessman Seán Quinn’s large investment in the bank.

The paper says Moran helped set up meetings between Anglo and Fine Gael’s Enda Kenny, then leader of the opposition, in late 2008 to push the bank’s interests within political circles after the introduction of the State bank guarantee.