4 Custom House Capital executives jailed over €61m conspiracy to defraud investors

Because it's all over the place, and offers scant details on what actually happened.

Compare to a writeup from say, the Washington Post, I'll gift the article link so you can see how I mean: https://wapo.st/3BwtgGT

For example the quote you have given in the OP, that's not there, none of the details about what actually happened, just what the outcome was and generalized terms from the judge:

To have the conversation you want to have, about their mens rea etc., that's about as threadbare as you can get. I have no idea who did what, who pressured who, what X's role in the conspiracy was compared to Y's etc. Just vague 'ye were adults and should have had cop on'

I know a lot more about that german heist Wapo wrote up by comparison just from the first skim of it than I do reading this RTE piece twice for this criminal conspiracy. I don't possibly know what they were thinking because we barely know what they did, or what kind of property they bought, or what the majority of the victim impacts were. We don't even know the substance of the false statements they were given about where their money supposedly was at. And a criminal overuse of the phrases "he said" and "she said" vs. 'officials said' 'the judge said' etc. even while breaking lines into paragraphs, makes it a fright pain to read. NO LESS THAN 15X in the article do they type "s/he said", the article is broken into THIRTY NINE PARAGRAPHS (**** lunacy), TWELVE of them open with "s/he said"

I tend to agree - I read it on the phone the other day and was utterly confused and kept having to go back up to see who s/he was at any time, and at the end wasn't really sure of what they had been convicted of. It needed less paragraphs, and a couple of bolded paragraph headings like 'crime details', 'guilty pleas', 'sentencing', 'victim reaction'.

This is a better article. Four Custom House Capital executives jailed for roles in defrauding investors (breakingnews.ie)

"The court previously heard that CHC entered agreements to buy properties in mainland Europe at the time of financial crash. In 2008, CHC began to use client funds to meet these obligations, often without the knowledge or authorisation of clients. It was the prosecution's case that transactions on CHC's systems were backed out of property before valuations were issued to clients. These valuations were misleading and did not show clients the true location of their funds."

This part seems to be the actual crime. It reads like people were shown valuations (statements) which showed their money was safely and continuously in some moderate yield investment vehicle, whereas in reality it was used in high-risk property funds, so the statements were either falsified or the money was just being moved back on the day of the statement (I think its the latter).

Definitely this.

Normally you get away with it and get rich.

This guy only gets a sentence of 12 months (?), not much of a deterrent.

Appreciate the explanation. That makes more sense. The inaction of regulators is of no surprise.