Brendan Mullin: the case of a 'bank for the rich' and the mystery ...

At the centre of the trial of former rugby star Brendan Mullin for theft was the inner workings of a “bank for the rich” and a mystery €500,000 transfer that, over a decade later, has never been tracked down.

The three-week Dublin Circuit Criminal Court trial featured a company called Spice Holdings, which the court heard Mullin introduced to Bank of Ireland Private Bank in 2010, and which was sent a €500,000 transfer from the private bank in 2011 that has never been recovered.

Mullin (61) initially stood trial accused of 15 charges – nine counts of theft, five of false accounting and one count of deception. Towards the end of the trial, the jury was directed by the presiding judge, Martin Nolan, to find Mullin not guilty of the deception charge.

The prosecution alleged that Mullin used his position as managing director of the private bank to steal €573,281 on dates between 2011 and 2013.

These charges related to €500,000 which was transferred to Spice Holdings in 2011 and just over €61,000 in Mullin’s personal legal fees due to McCann FitzGerald that were paid by the private bank in 2012 and 2013.

It also included payments to Grant Thornton (just under €6,000) and Beechwood Partners accountants (€6,150), which Mullin alleged the bank had agreed to pay on his behalf as a gesture of goodwill when his application for a personal loan was refused.

The jury was told that this was a theft trial in which no money was missing. Mullin arranged for €500,000 to be paid to the private bank in 2015 because, the defence asserted, he felt under pressure by the bank’s solicitors and didn’t want such a serious allegation hanging over him.

Defence counsel said Mullin paid the bank through his company, Quantum, on the basis that Spice Holdings would square off this money with his company “at some ill-defined point in the future”.

The prosecution said this payment was an attempt by Mullin “to make it go away”.

Either way, the fact remains that half a million euro ended up in a Channel Islands bank account and has not been traced since.

The rainmaker

The three-week trial heard defence assertions that, despite not having a background in banking, Mullin was recruited by Bank of Ireland Private Bank in 2010 as a “rainmaker” to head the “bank for the rich” and bring in high-net-worth customers.

Before he joined Bank of Ireland, Mullin, a former rugby international who played for Ireland and the British and Irish Lions, had worked for stockbrokers and also had his own investment business

Brendan Grehan SC, defending, told the jury that Mullin was surrounded by competent career bankers and that his role within the private bank “doesn’t seem to be incredibly clear other than he signed lots of pieces of paper that others had already signed”.

The court heard that, when he joined the private bank, Mullin was being personally sued by a couple in relation to investments where they claimed they made a loss, dating back to around 2007. It was these litigation fees that were at the heart of the McCann FitzGerald matter, where Mullin directed the solicitors to send the bill for their services to Bank of Ireland Private Bank

In relation to the €500,000 Spice Holdings transfer, the court was brought through a chain of events in 2011 in which life assurance clients were owed money from different arms of the bank in relation to the payout of claims.

It emerged that a small number of clients had not been aware of a clause stipulating that, if their spouse died within five years of taking out the life assurance product, they could get their money back and not make a loss. This was at a time when the financial crash had occurred and the value of such products had fallen, the jury was told.

The court heard Bank of Ireland Private Bank and New Ireland Life Assurance – both arms of the bank’s wealth management division – reached an agreement to equally split the refund due to customers, which amounted to about €1 million.

As a result, New Ireland agreed to pay the private bank €500,000 to help pay off the customers. In December 2011, €500,000 was transferred from New Ireland to Bank of Ireland Private Bank. However, it was then sent to Spice Holdings which had an account with Northern Trust.

These funds remained in this account for six months, before they were transferred in June 2012 to another account in the name of Spice Holdings, which was held by Royal Bank of Canada in a branch in Jersey in the Channel Islands.

Gardaí have not been able to track down the money or discover what happened to it, the court heard. The defence submitted a “veil was drawn over matters by Royal Bank of Canada” and investigators “got nowhere with them”. This was a huge gap in the prosecution’s case, they submitted.

The prosecution alleged the transfer was for Mullin’s benefit, while the defence maintained there was no evidence whatsoever that Mullin or anyone connected with him benefited from it. It was a “processing error”, Mullin told gardaí when interviewed.

Spice Holdings

Earlier, in 2010, Mullin “did what he had been recruited to do”, according to defence counsel, in terms of bringing in new business to the bank. He introduced Spice Holdings in anticipation this company would bring in €4 million to €5 million.

The court heard that in 2011, when the life assurance issue arose, Sean Casey, then managing director of New Ireland, met Mullin to thrash out how they should divide the claim. They agreed to split the bill, with New Ireland pledging to transfer €500,000 to Bank of Ireland Private Banking.

During a meeting in July 2011, Mr Casey told the court, Mullin asked him if this payment could be sent directly to a special client account, to which Mr Casey replied: “Not a chance.”

The trial heard the money was duly transferred to the private bank’s regular account from New Ireland but that it came back within a couple of days, with the reference ‘Spice Holdings’ on it. This surprised Mr Casey, who said he had never heard of Spice Holdings and who was now in a position that he still owed half a million to the private bank.

Mr Casey told the jury repeatedly that he was “very happy” to pay the money to private banking and that he felt it was the bank’s moral responsibility to pay the customers.

Once he had ascertained that the refund had come from the bank and not Spice Holdings, Mr Casey said he was of the opinion that private banking could come and get the money from New Ireland if they wanted it. In the meantime, the jury heard, the €500,000 was “resting in our account for future payment”. (“I don’t know if he was being serious here,” Mr Grehan later quipped.)

The money was eventually paid to private banking’s regular account in December 2011.

Concerns raised

Kim Lloyd, who worked in compliance for Bank of Ireland Private Bank, told the court she also had never heard of Spice Holdings when Mullin told her in July 2011 that he was looking for the New Ireland transfer to go directly to them.

When she raised concerns about it, she said Mullin told her it was “an exceptional item” and “wouldn’t be repeated”. She said he countersigned the authorisation letter in her presence and that it had already been signed by two bankers – head of finance at the bank Paul Gallagher and client services director Nicola Johnston.

Nicola Johnston told the court that later the same evening, Mullin – her direct line manager – came to her office and asked her to sign the authorisation letter, despite her saying she knew nothing about it. She said he stood over her desk and she felt she had “no alternative other than to sign it”.

She said she felt extremely uncomfortable afterwards, as signing an authorisation letter without the supporting documents was known as “blind signing” and was a sackable offence.

Ms Johnston said she cancelled the payment the following morning and informed Mullin she had done so.

Ms Johnston said the next thing she heard about Spice Holdings was when she was informed by Mr Gallagher in an email in December 2011 that the transfer had been signed off on. When she queried it, Mr Gallagher told her it was to do with “error and breaches” on the New Ireland side and they were not privy to the details.

Ms Johnston said this gave her “no comfort whatsoever”. She said she was heavily involved in the New Ireland issue and knew the names of all the impacted clients. “Spice Holdings was not one of those clients,” she told the court.

Defence counsel said Ms Johnston’s account of Mullin standing over her desk that evening was “fiction” and “nonsense”, pointing out that Ms Lloyd, who kept a contemporaneous note of events that day, had stated Ms Johnston had already signed the letter when she saw it earlier that day.

McCann FitzGerald

In 2012 and 2013, the private bank paid McCann FitzGerald solicitors a total of €61,535 for legal advice it had given Mullin in relation to his personal litigation issue.

A number of witnesses gave evidence in relation to four invoices, two for €18,450, one for €18,792 and one for €5,842, with the court hearing that the law firm readdressed the invoices from Mullin’s home address to the bank’s on his instructions.

One of the most senior of the firm’s witnesses was Roddy Bourke, a litigation partner who represented Mullin in his personal litigation case.

Mr Bourke told the court that Mullin made it clear to him that the bank was paying for a portion of his legal fees and that another partner in the firm, Mark White, was of the understanding the bank was “going to stand behind Mullin for 50 per cent of his costs”.

In Garda interviews, Mullin’s position was that he made the legal firm aware from the beginning that he was personally responsible for his legal fees and that he had money set aside for them.

The defence case was that the invoices were paid by the bank as a result of “mix-ups, confusion and inattention” and that the invoices may have been mistakenly put in a bundle of client invoices and paid in error.

When Bank of Ireland contacted McCann FitzGerald to query the invoices at the end of March, 2013, Mullin went to McCann FitzGerald in early April with his chequebook, paid the invoices and got them to refund the bank.

The court heard the payments came to light in the private bank when one of the McCann FitzGerald invoices was discovered to have been processed through an account referred to in court as the “Case X” legal costs account.

The court heard this was an account the private bank had set up to cover the costs of a highly litigious, high-value property debt case.

Des Hanrahan, then a director of Specialist Property Group in Bank of Ireland, told the court that the invoice had been signed by Mullin and another bank worker, who had “no rights to that account”.

The discovery of this invoice sparked an internal investigation into invoice and payment discrepancies within the bank, leading to Mullin’s suspension and eventual resignation from the private bank in July, 2013.

Bank criticism

Prior to Mr Hanrahan giving evidence, Judge Nolan had, in the absence of the jury, expressed his frustration at what he called the “piecemeal co-operation” from Bank of Ireland.

“I’m fed up telling the bank this is a criminal prosecution,” he said. “I don’t want to get cross, but I have to repeat myself in these matters.”

The judge later asked: “Is the Bank of Ireland treating this court on a need-to-know basis? I want the full note Mr Hanrahan made [relating to his interactions with Mullin in March, 2013]. Tell this auditor if he doesn’t disclose it, I’ll be sending the sergeant down to get it. I’m fed up with this piecemeal co-operation.”

Closing speeches

In his closing speech to the jury last week, Dominic McGinn SC, prosecuting, told jurors they didn’t have to consider the “complex world of banking” but only Mullin’s behaviour at the time. “What the case boils down to is dishonesty,” he said.

He told the jury that paying the money back was not a defence, if the intention was always to deprive the owner of it.

“Was it a big mistake, a misunderstanding, or was [Mullin] doing it dishonestly? That’s what the case is about.”

In his closing speech to the jury, Mr Grehan said the outstanding characteristics in the case were the extraordinary delay in bringing it to court and the fact that the bank was not at a loss.

Mullin arranged for his company, Quantum, to make a €500,000 repayment to the bank because he felt under pressure and to ensure there was no serious allegation hanging over him, the jury was told.

But because of the delay in bringing the case some 10 years later, for which there is no good reason, Mullin has “carried on with his life with the burden of this historic matter hanging over him like the sword of Damocles, not knowing when it is going to fall”, Mr Grehan said.

The court heard Mullin, of Stillorgan Road, Donnybrook, Dublin 4, has no previous convictions and no investigations outstanding against him.

The court heard Mullin, who did not give evidence at trial, was not interviewed by gardaí until 2018 and not charged until 2021.

Defence counsel said this delay made it difficult for people to recollect events and it also led to the issue of missing witnesses, such as Paul Gallagher, whose name came up several times and whom the jury was told was unavailable.

Mr Grehan submitted that Bank of Ireland “prioritised getting its money back over seeking to advance its investigation” and that the Garda investigation “only progressed when Bank of Ireland was satisfied it had its money back”.

He urged the jury to acquit Mullin of all charges

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