Prosecuting lawyers in the trial of the former chief executive of Anglo Irish Bank, David Drumm, have described the transactions he is on trial for as "a massive con".
Mr Drumm has pleaded not guilty to conspiring to defraud and to false accounting.
The prosecution alleges he authorised a conspiracy in 2008, to deceive people by making it look as if deposits to Anglo, were € 7.2 billion greater than they were.
After almost five months, the trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal court, is nearing an end.
The 14 jurors were told the defence will not be calling any evidence.
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Senior Counsel Mary Rose Gearty began her speech to the jury, on behalf of the prosecution.
She described the transactions at the centre of the case and the way they were presented to the market as a massive con and said it was a dishonest, fraudulent scheme and the figures produced at the end were false.
Ms Gearty said money came from Anglo and went around in a circle via Irish Life and Permanent and Irish Life Assurance.
It ended up in Anglo's figures in September 2008 as a €7.2bn customer deposit, which looked better for the bank.
But she said it was not "real money".
She said Mr Drumm presented this false figure deliberately and dishonestly and this was preceded by months of arrangements culminating in an agreement to carry out this criminal conspiracy.
Ms Gearty told the jurors it was important to try Mr Drumm on these charges and on nothing else. They should consider the evidence, and leave all bias or emotional reaction outside, she said.
She said when considering the evidence given by witnesses in this case, the jurors should remember that many of them were former employees of Anglo or Irish Life and Permanent and many still worked in the same industry.
She said they should remember that everyone tries to present their best selves and that is something juries must assess.
Ms Gearty said what anyone else knew about the transactions beforehand or found out afterwards was irrelevant to Mr Drumm's guilt or innocence.
Jury told not to speculate
Ms Gearty told the jury not to speculate.
She said there was a thread running through the defence that the system was under pressure and the bank was going down anyway.
But she said this did not exonerate those who acted to try to keep the bank limping on for another few days.
Ms Gearty said the prosecution alleged Mr Drumm conspired with three named people - Irish Life and Permanent's former CEO, Denis Casey, Anglo's then financial director Willie McAteer and John Bowe of Anglo's Treasury Department as well as others.
She told the jurors that to convict Mr Drumm of a conspiracy they had to find he had conspired with at least one other person.
She referred to the tape of a phone call which took place on 29 September 2008 between Mr Drumm, Mr McAteer and Mr Bowe, and said this was clear, reliable, contemporaneous evidence of the three men's involvement in the conspiracy.
Ms Gearty told the jurors they should not be sidetracked into considering why only Mr Drumm was on trial for these charges. She said the jury's views on this were not relevant.
She said the prosecution did not have to prove that there was any actual loss or gain as a result of the conspiracy.
She said what was intended was to induce depositors, investors or shareholders to made decisions about economic affairs based on false information.
Ms Gearty told the jury members that what was relevant was whether they believed the scheme was dishonest and that Mr Drumm knew this when he presented the figures to the market.
Essentially she said the transactions were carried out and presented to induce people to leave their money in Anglo, at a time when Mr Drumm and many of his colleagues knew the bank was going down the tubes.
People were prevented, she said, from having the information they were entitled to, to make informed decisions about their financial affairs.
Ms Gearty said Anglo had agreed to lend €10bn in 2008 and early on in the year had identified a target of €7bn for customer deposits.
They had to reach that target "by hook or by crook" she said, and in the end they had to reach it by crook when they found willing co conspirators to go along with an "accounting solution".
The prosecution told the jury that there was no evidence that anyone from the Central Bank or the Financial Regulator's office knew about these transactions before they happened.
Even if they did, Ms Gearty said that was totally irrelevant. There was no necessity for Anglo to mislead, and she said necessity was not a defence.
Ms Gearty said the prosecution fundamentally disagreed with some of the material in what she described as Mr Drumm's "so-called admissions".
She said some were self-serving and some were not based on the facts of the case. She said the transactions at the centre of the case were not real customer deposits and instead came from the same one billion euro circulating.
She said the transactions were not discussed in detail in minutes of meetings at the bank, as it would have been obvious then that they were dishonest.
Ms Gearty said it was inevitable that the jury would find these transactions were fundamentally dishonest. She said the scheme was so monumentally fraudulent that it was hard to understand why it had not been called out by people in the bank.
David Drumm was 'captain of the ship, heading into a storm'
Defence counsel, Brendan Grehan, told the jurors that these transactions took place in a particular context unrivalled in living memory. He said Mr Drumm had never shirked responsibility for them.
Mr Drumm was the captain of the ship, heading into the storm, Mr Grehan said. He did what he had to do to try to get the ship through the storm, and did not try to blame anyone down in the engine room for bringing the ship onto the rocks.
Mr Grehan said Anglo Irish Bank was one of the most reviled institutions in living memory but he asked the jurors to approach the evidence with open minds.
This case was not about all the ills Anglo was perceived to have caused to this country, it was about a very specific set of transactions in 2008 he said.
He said Mr Drumm had never denied anything he did in relation to these transactions and "straight up" accepted responsibility for them, but he did not set out to commit a fraud.
He said the jury could not ignore the circumstances of the time that the country was going through, the worst financial crisis in history even though the prosecution wanted them to assess the case from the comfort of their armchairs looking back in hindsight.
He asked them not to swallow everything thrown at them by the prosecution.
Mr Grehan said banking was a highly regulated industry and those in charge had exhorted the Irish banks to help each other out.
He said the transactions had been carried out openly and transparently, not furtively, and the Financial Regulator had been told what had happened by at least by 1 October and had not objected to Anglo's accounts being published in December.
He said the bank's audit committee, not David Drumm, had decided that no explanatory note needed to be attached to the published accounts.
Mr Grehan said they were being asked to find that there had been a massive conspiracy to defraud, the biggest in history, and yet there was no witness to say they had been influenced by the figures to buy shares.
The bank's share price did not go up after the figures were published, instead it fell off a cliff, because by that stage, he said, the country was headlong into its worst ever recession and no one cared about customer deposits.
Mr Grehan suggested the case had been billed as something greater than it was. He said the jurors must have been salivating at the mouth when they first heard about it and must have looked forward to getting stuck into some "real badness".
He said it did not live up to its billing. There was no evidence that anyone stole a cent or lost anything or gained anything in relation to this transaction.
There was no evidence that anyone had €7.2 billion stashed away in a Cayman Island account.
He said Mr Drumm never set out to commit any kind of fraud in relation to this matter. The Central Bank came to him and asked him to tog out for Ireland, along with others.
He said in hindsight, Anglo may have had insurmountable problems, but when you are in the middle of a crisis, hope springs eternal.
He said you man the pumps and try to keep going. At the time, he said all you can do is your best. He said Mr Drumm did his best in good faith, in the circumstances which arose.
He did not morph into a criminal mastermind who committed the biggest fraud in criminal history.
Mr Grehan will continue his speech to the jury tomorrow.
They will then hear a summary of the evidence and directions on the law from Judge Karen O'Connor.
It is likely they will begin considering their verdict early next week.
