The former chief executive of Anglo Irish Bank, David Drumm, has received a six-year prison sentence after his conviction for fraud and false accounting at Ireland's failed lender, the AFR reports. The case against Drumm centred on a €7.2 billion circular transaction scheme between Anglo and Irish Life & Permanent, a bancassurer, to "dishonestly" make Anglo's customer deposits - which are viewed as more secure than deposits from another bank - look larger than they were when the bank was under acute strain in 2008. Drumm joins the very small club of senior banking executives to be put behind bars in connection with the 2008 financial crisis. US banks' hopes of making record payouts to shareholders over the coming year were boosted as the industry cleared the first round of the Federal Reserve's stress tests, the FT reports. Regulators said 35 of the country's biggest banks had shown that their balance sheets were strong enough to cope with the kind of financial meltdown that caused several lenders to fail in 2008, although some would come close to breaching some capital requirements in a worst-case scenario. The banks tested would register US$578bn in losses in the Fed's simulated economic shock, yet they would be able to continue lending and emerge from the crisis without another taxpayer bailout.