Sean FitzPatrick's nauseating grin as he left the High Court last week caused me to compare his fate to that of 'Uncle Bernie' Madoff and his €48.5bn Ponzi scheme. Madoff's scam caused headlines around the world while FitzPatrick's mismanagement will cost the Irish taxpayer about €25bn.

It goes back as far as 2001. Adam Lebor's book, The Believers, recounts how in May of that year Managed Account Reports wrote an article 'Madoff Tops Chart: Skeptics Ask How' saying that experts were "baffled by the way the firm has obtained such consistent non-volatile returns". At home, banker-turned-journalist (and now Nama portfolio asset manager) Michael Murray wrote: "Among banking market observers, there is no shortage of sceptics about Anglo Irish Bank. The bank announced another set of sparkling results last week but many believe that this agile, fleet-of-foot niche player will fall flat on its face once the economy turns down. So far, chief executive Sean FitzPatrick has proved them wrong but the suggestion from Anglo's sceptics is that he is about to get a bloody nose."

By June 2007, that blow was being delivered and FitzPatrick aggressively counterpunched by targeting the levels of regulation in this country. "The tide of regulation has gone far enough. It is time to shout stop," FitzPatrick said. "We should be proud of our success, not suspicious of it. Our wealth creators should be rewarded and admired, not subjected to levels of scrutiny which convicted criminals would rightly find intrusive. This is corporate McCarthyism and we shouldn't tolerate it." That October, meanwhile, Madoff told an audience he had complained to the SEC that his industry was over-regulated.

Madoff rented impressive offices to reassure doubters, Lebor writes. For a bank intent on rocketing to €100bn of lending, Anglo's offices on St Stephen's Green looked tired. So they went to Liam Carroll and backed the development of a new head office in Dublin's docklands. And when it all began to fall apart after the St Patrick's Day massacre of its share price in 2008, Anglo went to Carroll and asked for even more office space.

Then there was the same use of banks in Vienna, the hiring of family members, the loans given to them and the bed and breakfasting at year end – while FitzPatrick moved his own loans out of Anglo and into Irish Nationwide, Madoff's clients were told their money had been moved out of stocks and into US Treasury Bills.

And then there are the wives. Ruth Madoff was allowed keep $2.5m but her husband was sentenced to 150 years.

FitzPatrick's wife, by contrast, has €3m of his pension fund so all talk of him having a monthly income of €188 is nonsense when that is taken into account. Hence the smile.