It was perhaps the most high profile white collar case in the history of the State.
Sean FitzPatrick, former chairman of the Anglo Irish Bank, was accused of misleading the bank’s auditors in relation to loans issued to him by the bank.
Those borrowings reached €100m at one point but were not disclosed Anglo’s annual report as they should have been.
The astonishing mismanagement of the case led the Judge John Alymer to direct the jury to acquit Mr FitzPatrick.
Much of the focus of attention has been on the handling of the investigation by the Office of Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE).
It is a State body, which was set up in 2001 in the wake of revelations at tribunals.
The ODCE's director is Ian Drennan who formerly ran the Irish Auditing and Accounting Supervisory Authority
The watchdog’s main function is to ensure firms conform with the wide ranging Companies Act.
It does so by advocating compliance and taking legal action when firms breach the rules.
Those cases are frequently civil actions.
The ODCE also takes criminal actions at District Court level or sends more serious cases to the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Many of the cases involve failings by small companies.
However, the issues that came to light after the nationalisation of Anglo Irish Bank were in an entirely different league to issues the watchdog had dealt with in recent years.
Banks are by their nature complex organisations with huge volumes of transactions and vast sums of money.
As the country’s corporate watchdog the ODCE was asked to take charge of two enormous investigations involving Anglo Irish Bank.
Prior that the only time the ODCE took on a bank was its probe into a series of financial scandals at National Irish Bank which resulted in disqualification of a number of individuals from acting as directors in future.
During the Anglo probe the bulk of the ODCE's staff were in administrative roles but it required highly skilled staff.
In 2014 it had 40 staff but only one accountant and two solicitors.
In 2015 the situation worsened. It had the equivalent of 37.5 staff but no accountants and one solicitor.
This was the same year that its solicitor Kevin O'Connell shredded documents relevant to the Sean FitzPatrick trial.
In its statement on the issue the ODCE said those actions should not have occurred.
It added: "However, they occurred at a time during which the staff member concerned was under enormous stress and against a backdrop of significant mental health issues, certain of which pre-dated the incident and which culminated in the staff member concerned being hospitalised for almost two months in the immediate aftermath of those events."
This raises a series of questions.
Why was Mr O'Connell running two major investigations on his own?
If he was under "enormous stress" and had "significant mental issues" what steps were taken by the ODCE take to ensure Mr O’Connell was not overwhelmed by the workload?
Why weren't others appointed to work with him?
The ODCE was running multiple investigations into Anglo Irish Bank.
It is worth pointing out the other strands resulted in convictions for bank's former finance director Willie McAteer and former director of lending Pat Whelan for separate offences.
But given that Sean FitzPatrick was at the helm of the bank for three decades as CEO and then as chairman, it meant the most high profile case became a shambles.
The remedy put forward by Government to ensure lessons are learned following the FitzPatrick case is that the ODCE’s director Mr Drennan will report to Enterprise Minister Mary Mitchell O’Connor on the watchdog's shortcomings.
Labour leader Brendan Howlin has a point when he calls for a robust independent investigation.
That is because the prospect of a State body conducting an investigation into itself does little for public confidence.
Comment via twitter @davidmurphyRTE
