Tiarnan O'Mahoney and Bernard Daly appeal convictions and prison sentences

This report is a localnews.ie summary based on public court reporting and records; sources are listed below.

Former Anglo Irish Bank executives Bernard Daly and Tiarnan O'Mahoney were appealing their convictions and prison sentences at the Court of Appeal. They had been jailed in July for conspiracy to falsify bank records and defraud the Revenue Commissioners.

Daly, the former company secretary, received two years in prison from Judge McCartan at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court. Tiarnan O'Mahoney, the bank’s former chief operations officer, received three years.

The proceedings were reported on 13 January 2016. At the hearing that day, Sean Guerin SC, representing Daly, argued that his client had suffered an unfair trial. He said the judge presented disputed evidence as fact and gave an erroneous account of evidence that undermined the defence. He also argued that the jury should have been warned it might be dangerous to convict on uncorroborated accomplice evidence, rather than simply being told to exercise caution.

On 13 January 2016, Dominic McGinn SC, for the prosecution, began submissions before Mr Justice George Birmingham, Mr Justice Garrett Sheehan and Mr Justice John Edwards. He defended the statutory time limits and changes to the indictment, including altered conspiracy dates. He said the dates changed because the conspiracy had begun earlier than initially understood.

Mr McGinn described an ongoing conspiracy involving three bank officials around the accounts of John Peter O’Toole. The report said Daly was excluded from another offence concerning concealment of six other accounts. It also described a separate offence of omitting the O’Toole account from a list to be provided to Revenue in November 2003. Mr McGinn called the conspiracies concurrent and said the matters were correctly joined in one indictment on essentially the same evidence.

The appeal was continuing.