A DUBLIN solicitor has said it is a “racing certainty” that shareholders will be taking a case for damages arising from what has happened with Anglo Irish Bank.

Julian Deale, a solicitor with a practice in Monkstown, Co Dublin, said he has been contacted by a number of former shareholders in the now nationalised bank, including a number of members of staff.

He said he was due to meet counsel yesterday evening and would be engaging an accountant to work on the case.

He said consideration will be given to taking a case against the bank and its auditors Ernst Young, as well as Irish Nationwide.

The former chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, Seán FitzPatrick, has said he temporarily transferred massive loans to Irish Nationwide each year over a period of eight years, so that the balance on the loans would not be recorded in his bank’s year end accounts. The revelation badly damaged the reputation of the bank.

Mr Deale said he is organising a public meeting in the Royal Marine Hotel, Dún Laoghaire, for next Friday, for those former shareholders interested in pursuing the matter. The shareholders who have contacted Mr Deale to date are all individuals.

“I think it’s a racing certainty that we will go ahead in some guise or another,” he said.

JP Galligan, of Lavelle Coleman solicitors, said it had also been contacted by a number of aggrieved former shareholders in Anglo Irish Bank, including people involved with self-administered pension funds. Some of the prospective clients are employees of the bank who received bonuses or remuneration in shares.

Mr Galligan said his firm is assessing the information that is in the public domain in order to decide if a case can be substantiated. He said they were examining the position in relation to all the parties involved, including the directors, the company, the auditors and the Financial Regulator.

He said the firm would also be looking at the position of stockbrokers or investment advisers who acted for clients who invested in the bank in the period immediately prior to it being privatised.

Advice would be sought from senior counsel in the near future and the firm would then seek to find out how many people were interested in going forward.

He said the firm had run multi-plaintiff cases where the plaintiffs had substantially similar cases.

A key consideration would be the question of whether the company and its directors lived up to their duties and obligations to the shareholders, he said. The board’s obligations were particularly serious, given that the company sold its shares on the stock exchange.

It is understood the bank is insured against certain types of claims and any damages any party might achieve could be a matter for the insurance company or companies concerned, rather than the exchequer.

One legal source who did not wish to be named said that while shareholders might have a potential case against the company or its auditors, the company, now owned by the State, could have a case against its former directors or its auditors, or both.