Former Anglo Irish Bank boss Séan FitzPatrick arrested in Wicklow

Crisis-hit bank's former chairman Séan FitzPatrick detained for second time as police trawl through millions of emails
Sean FitzPatrick, former head of Anglo Irish Bank
Séan FitzPatrick, the former chairman and group chief executive of Anglo Irish Bank, has been arrested in Wicklow. Photograph: Gary O'Neill Gary O'Neill/Gary O'Neill

The former chairman of Anglo Irish Bank Séan FitzPatrick was arrested by fraud detectives at his Co Wicklow home on Friday morning.

The 63-year-old banker, who was previously arrested in 2010, was being held at Bray police station under section 4 of Ireland's Criminal Justice Act 1984, which means he can be questioned for up to 24 hours. The current inquiry is being carried out by officers from the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation and the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement.

Their inquiries are centred on directors' loans at the time when FitzPatrick was in charge of the bank. In particular the unit is focusing on a €7bn (£6bn) deposit transfer between Anglo Irish Bank and the Irish Life & Permanent building society, which is believed to have been used to conceal the state of the bank's books.

During the Irish property boom the Anglo Irish Bank became the preferred lender to builders and speculators. When the bubble burst three years ago, the bank was left heavily exposed and within a year was reporting losses of €12.7bn.

The last Fianna Fáil-led government pumped more than €10bn of taxpayers' money into the bank, which was later nationalised and renamed the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation.

When news spread that FitzPatrick was being detained in Bray, a seaside town in Wicklow, to the south of Dublin, a small band of protesters descended on the garda station, demanding prosecutions for bankers they say helped wreck the Irish economy. FitzPatrick and Anglo Irish Bank's former chief executive David Drumm have become national hate figures in the republic.

The detectives investigating the disgraced bank are now trawling through millions of emails from its former executives, garda sources confirmed.

One source told the Guardian that the inquiry team may have to examine up to 10m emails and other messages between Anglo executives before and after the bank went bust, as well as CD discs, some of which are encrypted.

Three files on the investigations into Anglo, now almost three years old, have been sent to the Irish department of public prosecutions. So far however no one has faced criminal charges in connection to the bank's collapse.

Irish banks came under further fire with an independent member of the Dáil claiming the Bank of Ireland was worse than the Black and Tans, the notorious British military auxiliaries who served in Ireland during the war of independence.

In an unprecedented outburst in the Dublin parliament, Mattie McGrath TD claimed "thugs" acting for the bailed-out bank had seized machinery from one of his constituents in Co Tipperary, a farmer who had been in business for 40 years.

He urged the public not to buy the seized machines at a forthcoming auction in the county. "I tell the people to stay away from those auctions. They are buying people's misery.

"The Black and Tans didn't do it," he added.