A FRIEND of the wife of former Anglo Irish Bank chief executive David Drumm has been drawn into a fresh lawsuit taken against the couple to prevent Mrs Drumm from receiving any proceeds from the sale of the couple’s properties.
The court-appointed official in Mr Drumm’s bankruptcy action in Boston filed a legal complaint on Monday against him, his wife Lorraine and her friend Anne Marie Greenberg, an employee at the property broker Coldwell Banker in Sudbury, Massachusetts.
The trustee in the bankruptcy proceedings, Boston lawyer Kathleen Dwyer, said in the complaint that a “sham trust” was set up to buy the Drumms’ home in the Boston suburb of Wellesley.
The purchase of the home was one of a series of transfers of property from Mr Drumm to his wife to put assets beyond the reach of his creditors, including Anglo which he owes €8.6 million, Ms Dwyer has claimed in her complaint.
She claims that Ms Greenberg is the trustee of Epiphany Nominee Trust, which bought the house in Wellesley in January 2010 for $2 million. Mr Drumm and his wife are the trust’s beneficial owners.
The house was bought with a loan of $1.23 million from Boston Private Bank and $830,000 in cash from Mrs Drumm’s account at the bank. Ms Dwyer said that the couple entered a property agreement setting out their rights in relation to the property. The agreement stated that the €830,000 used to purchase the house “belonged to and was owned exclusively” by Mrs Drumm and that her husband had “no past, present or future right or interest in said money”.
This put the ownership of the house in Mrs Drumm’s name.
Ms Dwyer said the representation in the agreement that Mr Drumm had no interest in the funds was “blatantly false” and an attempt to conceal Mr Drumm’s interest in the Wellesley property.
While Mrs Drumm is entitled to half the proceeds from any sale of the family home in Wellesley, the trustee argues that Mrs Drumm would be “unjustly enriched” if she retained an interest in the house.
In an attempt to recover money for Mr Drumm’s creditors as a result of fraudulent transfers, Ms Dwyer is also seeking to overturn the transfer of their holiday home at Chatham in Cape Cod and their former home in Dublin on the Abington estate in Malahide to Mrs Drumm.
The trustee is seeking to sell the properties to repay Mr Drumm’s creditors who are owed more than €10 million.
Ms Dwyer claims that, starting in the autumn of 2007 and throughout 2008 and 2009, the Drumms “orchestrated” a series of transfers by which Mr Drumm moved assets to his wife.
The intention was to defraud his creditors at a time when Mr Drumm was insolvent or believed that he would incur debts beyond his ability to repay his creditors.
She claimed that, until September 2008, Mrs Drumm had not held bank accounts in her sole name for at least 10 years. From September 2008 Mrs Drumm opened 15 accounts at eight banks.
In her complaint, Ms Dwyer claims that sums of €832,000 and $869,000 was transferred from Mr Drumm to joint accounts or Mrs Drumm’s sole accounts in 13 transactions between March 19th, 2008 and September 28th, 2009.
