Monday, May 30, 2011

The Anglo Saga and White Collar Crime in Ireland

The Irish Times has a couple of articles today about potential prosecution in the Anglo case and white collar crime in general that make for strange reading. The first article contains quotes from the DPP:
“The fact that a prosecution decision has not yet been taken is not due to any question of lack of resources,” Mr Hamilton added.
“If the situation changes in the future and I need additional resources I will not be slow to ask for them.”

I thought the problem was that they had lots of documents to go through; that volume of evidence to be examined was the reason for the delay. This was the reason offered in court to Justice Kelly as well some weeks ago, if reports are to be believed. 
But it is the "nature of the adversarial system rather than a lack of resources" that is the problem. 

Right.

The second article quotes a senior counsel as saying the relevant analogy from the US is the Rajarathnam case and not the Madoff case. I doubt that. Rajarathnam's prosecution was for insider trading. The prosecution had lots of wire tap evidence showing his contacts in various companies giving him inside information that was the basis of profitable trading activity. Anglo is quite different. If anything, it is more like Enron and Worldcom and does not seem to be all that complex.