Senior executives at Anglo Irish Bank look set to avoid being accused of reckless trading because of the government decision to bail out the bank. Under Irish company law, reckless trading can only be alleged by a liquidator or during an examinership, according to legal experts.

Directors of a company or its officers can be made personally liable for the debts of a company if they are found guilty of reckless trading, but they do not face imprisonment. Anglo Irish Bank will cost the taxpayer up to €35bn and its former chairman Sean Fitzpatrick has since been declared bankrupt while its former chief executive David Drumm has sought to be declared bankrupt in the United States.

One senior accounting source had suggested that employees of the bank could have faced reckless trading charges because they had released some borrowers from personal guarantees while the bank struggled to remain afloat. While it is not illegal to release personal guarantees, in the context with which it was done at Anglo the legal sources said it could have been construed as reckless trading under the Companies Act. However, the state's decision to step in and keep the bank alive means such a move cannot now take place.

It is known that the Garda investigation into Anglo Irish Bank is looking at how and why certain clients of the bank were released from personal guarantees.

The five threads of the investigation are the "back-to-back" deposits between Anglo and Irish Life & Permanent to make Anglo's results look better for the financial year ended September 2008; the financial assistance given by the bank to enable certain clients buy shares in the bank; Anglo's loans to its former directors and finally whether the four other strands of the investigation caused breaches of transparency regulations.

In January the Sunday Tribune revealed that a number of senior employees of Anglo Irish Bank were to be arrested as part of the Garda probe into the bank.

The investigation into the bank is expected to be concluded by the end of the year, with the first documents due to be sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions in the near future. The full investigation is finally expected to be concluded by the end of the first quarter of next year. At that stage it will have been underway for 27 months.