Four men have been given prison sentences of between 12 months and seven years on charges connected to a €61m conspiracy to defraud investors in collapsed investment firm Custom House Capital between 2008 and 2011.
The judge at the Circuit Criminal Court described the conspiracy as a highly organised, systematic, prolific plundering of clients' accounts.
The court heard the offences continued even after the Central Bank and Financial Regulator were alerted in 2009.
Judge Orla Crowe read more than 200 victim impact statements before imposing her sentences today.
She said the vast majority of the clients were people who had carefully put aside money for their later years and the impact of these crimes on them had been very significant.
She said what should have been years of contented enjoyment of the prudent investment of the results of their hard work had been destroyed.
The judge said she had been struck in the statements by the repeated assertion of personal shame by the people who had lost money.
She said that shame was misplaced. Instead, she said, they had been systematically deceived in a sophisticated operation which went on for almost three years, by people who owed them fiduciary duties.
She said in view of the scale of the offences, the number of injured parties, the duration of the conspiracy and the multiple acts involved, custodial sentences had to be imposed.
Harry Cassidy, 67, John Whyte, 53 and Paul Lavery, 47, all pleaded guilty to the conspiracy to defraud investors by intentionally misleading them about where their money was and how it was invested.
John Mulholland who is 73 and was a non-executive director of the company, pleaded guilty to neglectfully discharging his duty as a director.
Cassidy was the Chief Executive officer of Custom House Capital and co-founded the company with Mulholland. He was described as being in charge of the entire conspiracy and the judge said he breached every duty and all trust placed in him. She sentenced him to seven years in jail.
He will effectively serve a sentence of six years and ten months, taking into account two months he spent in custody in Germany before he returned to Ireland.
Whyte who was head of private clients and also a shareholder in the company was jailed for four years.
The judge said he stayed and participated in the conspiracy in the full knowledge of what was going on.
She said Lavery, the company's former head of finance, carried out directions he knew were wrong.
Although he had described being dominated by Cassidy, he was an adult and could have left the judge said. She sentenced him to three years in jail.
Mulholland who pleaded guilty before the other defendants, was jailed for 12 months for the neglect of his duties.
But the judge said Mulholland was aware by late 2008 that matters were awry in the company and did nothing to stop these acts from occurring.
The court heard Custom House Capital put deposits on a large portfolio of investment properties in Europe as the financial crisis began to take hold in 2008.
When the crash came, the company used clients' money to pay for the properties, without the knowledge or authorisation of the clients involved.
The statements provided to the clients were altered to hide what was being done with their money.
The court heard €61m of clients’ funds had been misappropriated and €41m had so far been recovered but there had been a "considerable delay" in distributing the recovered assets.
The liquidation of CHC is due to be completed at the end of 2025, 14 years after the company collapsed.
Four former clients of the company addressed the court at the sentence hearing last month, including Catherine Heron whose husband Patrick died in 2014.
She told the court he had died because of the stress of losing his savings.
Nick Coy, said his aunt, Helga who was born in Germany, didn’t know her savings had been stolen.
He said he had spent sleepless nights because of trying to protect her from the reality of her stolen life, until she died aged 92.
The judge said she had read all 200 victim impact statements provided to her.
Around 30 former clients of CHC came to court for the judge's sentence this afternoon. Many expressed their happiness that the men had been jailed although some thought the sentences could have been longer.
Margaret Moore, a small business owner said she and her husband, Barry had tried to do the prudent thing by investing money for their pensions. But she said what had been allowed to happen was "unbelievable".
She said she feared nothing had changed in terms of oversight and the financial community had to take it seriously.
She said the judge's comments sent out a signal that if you were going to mess with people’s pensions you could end up in jail for years.
She said their investment went bad not because it was a bad investment but because bad people took their money and did bad things with it.
But she said she felt sorry for people who were much older than she and her husband and had lost much more.
She said they had been shafted and this kind of thing would not encourage people to invest in pensions. The oversight she said was "shocking".
Her husband, Barry said the people who had lost money were not "high net-worth individuals", they were normal, self-employed people.
Ms Moore said the four men would all be in jail tonight.
She said she hoped they had spent a lot of time thinking about what they had done and she hoped none of them would ever be a director of a company again.
