The Court of Appeal has upheld the six-year-and-10-month prison sentence imposed on former Custom House Capital chief executive Harry Cassidy for conspiracy to defraud investors.
Cassidy pleaded guilty in January 2023 to participating in a conspiracy which misled clients about where and how their assets had been invested between October 2008 and July 2011. He was sentenced in Dublin Circuit Criminal Court after evidence that client funds had been diverted into property investments without authorisation and account records manipulated before valuations were sent to investors.
The Court of Appeal described the offending as exceptionally serious. Custom House Capital had 2,701 clients when it entered liquidation in 2011, many of them pension investors. Evidence before the sentencing court put misappropriated client assets at about €61 million. By April 2023, about €39 million had been returned, representing roughly 64% of those sums.
Cassidy argued that the 14-year headline sentence selected by the Circuit Court exceeded the maximum available for comparable statutory fraud offences. The appeal court rejected that argument. It held that conspiracy to defraud is a standalone common-law offence rather than merely an incomplete version of one particular theft or deception offence.
Mr Justice Edwards said the sheer scale of the scheme, its duration, the number of victims and losses running into tens of millions made this an exceptional case in which the usual sentencing limits of a single substantive offence did not apply.
The court also upheld the finding that Cassidy was the dominant figure in the conspiracy. He was CEO, a major shareholder and, according to the sentencing judge, the originator and principal driver of the scheme.
His guilty plea, remorse, previous good character, reduced circumstances, age, health and delay were reflected in a 50% reduction from 14 years to seven years, with a further two months allowed for custody in Germany.
The Court of Appeal found the resulting sentence proportionate and dismissed the appeal.