A former employee of Guinness & Mahon bank in Dublin has been disqualified for nine years as a director of any company as result of his role in setting up the illegal Ansbacher bank accounts.
Mr Padraig Collery is the first person to have been disqualified by the High Court arising from the Ansbacher investigation.
In her judgment, Ms Justice Mary Finlay-Geoghegan said: "The conduct of Mr Collery from 1991 to 1997 in relation both to Ansbacher and Hamilton Ross as found by the Inspectors is such as to make him unfit to be concerned in the management of a company."
Having concluded that the appropriate period of disqualification was 12 years because Mr Collery's conduct "was of a particularly serious nature" , she fixed the term at nine years from today's date after taking a number of mitigating factors into account.
Mr Paul Appleby, the Director of Corporate Enforcement, welcomed today's decision. "These were highly secretive operations which were exposed over time using the valuable investigative provisions in the Companies Acts.
"The message for others from today's judgment is that the use of corporate structures for unlawful purposes is not worth the potential damage to personal and corporate reputation," Mr Appleby said.
The Annual Report of the Revenue Commissioners for 2004 records that some €45.4 million had been paid to them by year-end arising from the Ansbacher investigations.
Only 108 of the identified 289 cases had been finalised at that stage, suggesting that further sizeable sums remained to be collected.