Bertie Ahern: The Man Who Blew the Boom: Power & Money (7 page)

When asked by Des O’Neill sc, counsel for the tribunal, Ahern agreed that Byrne did not attend the meetings with the trustees. He also agreed that Brennan had been a participant in every one of the items covered by Byrne’s report and had access to the associated legal files.

The report was given to the tribunal in March 2008 after it was told that it and an associated memorandum had been found in a room in St Luke’s called the library room. The memorandum was concerned with the funding of St Luke’s and appeared to be addressed to Brennan and Byrne. Byrne said he had never seen the document before, but he thought that it had perhaps been drafted as a result of questions he had raised with Ahern and Brennan and that it was never sent to him because the whole question of the report was dropped after Brennan’s unexpected death.

The memorandum set out information about a number of accounts that were linked to Ahern or St Luke’s and had become the subject of public hearings in May and June 2008. ‘As requested we checked the details on iv’, the memorandum began, in a reference to the fourth section of Byrne’s draft report, dealing with finance. The content of the memorandum was read into the record by Ahern’s counsel, Conor Maguire sc. It said the trust was created and a bank account, the
CODR
(Cumann O’Donovan Rossa) account, opened in 1987.

Tim was secretary, Joe chairman and the donors paid into the account in 1987,1988,1989 and 1990. The loan was not required. The total figure was as per the list but there were some late payments.

This information was all incorrect.

The document also mentioned a £30,000 ‘loan we gave to the Minogue/O’Keeffe ladies through Celia.’ This was a reference to a payment from an account called the
B
/
T
account, which became a significant matter in the erosion of Ahern’s credibility during February 2008. The reference is incorrect in that the money was given to Larkin and not to ‘the Minogue/O’Keeffe ladies’, who were related to her. Larkin used the money to purchase the house in which her elderly relatives had been living as tenants. It was purchased in Celia Larkin’s name, and there was no legal document in existence, as far as the tribunal could ascertain, stating that the payment to her was a loan. Nor was there any charge on the house. By the time the issue became public at the tribunal, the house was worth close to €1 million because of the property boom.

Under questioning by O’Neill, Ahern agreed that both Byrne’s draft report and the associated memo contained inaccuracies. The draft report was not accurate in that it indicated that the money had been raised by twenty-five people contributing £1,000 each per year, £73,200 being accumulated by late 1989. Ahern agreed that the twenty-five people donating £1,000 a year had never happened. He said that at the time of the meeting in the Gresham Hotel, where, the tribunal had been told, a number of people committed themselves to paying £1,000 a year towards the purchase of St Luke’s, some had suggested paying larger sums up front and being paid off as the others contributed over the years.

‘What did in effect happen wasn’t recorded by Mr Byrne [in the draft report] because it wasn’t given to him, isn’t that right?’ O’Neill said.

‘Obviously,’ Ahern replied.

O’Neill said the background documents, including the contract between the vendor and the purchaser, showed that the property had in fact been acquired on 8 January 1988. The money was actually paid over on that date. The deed of assignment registered in the Registry of Deeds was dated May 1988, four months later. O’Neill said this contrasted with the statement in Byrne’s draft report that the ‘property was acquired by deed of assignment to the five trustees in mid-1988.’ Ahern didn’t take issue with O’Neill. However, Ahern’s counsel argued that the report was factually correct, given the date on the deed of assignment. The Gresham Hotel meeting had taken place on 3 December 1987, the tribunal was told.

Ahern also agreed that the report was inaccurate in stating that by early 1988 the St Luke’s Club had raised £16,000. This had to be wrong, since no bank loan was taken out that year, despite the reference in the draft report to there being a resolution to borrow £50,000. The house had been purchased in January 1988 for £56,000 plus stamp duty and other costs.

When O’Neill put it to Ahern that if the Byrne report had been given to the media it would have been misleading, Ahern countered that it would have been misleading in relation to the financing of St Luke’s but accurate about other matters, such as the history of St Luke’s and what cumainn and committees made use of it, that is, the sort of information the media would have no interest in, because it was not directly relevant.

O’Neill also raised the issue of the two letting agreements, copies of which were sent to Byrne in the Law Library in 1997. The documents were letting agreements dated 10 January 1992, the year Reynolds became party leader, and 21 January 1994, the year Ahern succeeded him. Neither document was stamped by the Revenue Commissioners. They both described the premises occupied by Ahern and the rent that was to be paid. Ahern said he thought there would have been a letting agreement for 1993. O’Neill pointed out that in Ahern’s submission to the Revenue Commissioners in January 2007, in the wake of the disclosures concerning money he had received, his accountant, Des Peelo, wrote:

Mr Ahern did not make financial contributions during his circa intermittent two or three years stay at St Luke’s, in Drumcondra. We are not clear as to the tax status of this latter benefit and accordingly make a voluntary disclosure of same pending clarification of this matter with the Revenue.

Ahern said the submission to the Revenue Commissioners, made on his behalf and on his instructions, was incorrect.

O’Neill asked Ahern if the letting agreements might have been drafted solely so that he would be in a position to use them if anyone ever asked him a question about his use of the upstairs of St Luke’s, ‘whereas no such [letting] arrangement existed at all? And these were merely documents which were insurance to be produced in the event of somebody suggesting that your occupation of the property was in circumstances other than as a tenant?’

Ahern’s counsel interrupted O’Neill. The chairperson of the tribunal, Judge Alan Mahon, asked Ahern if there was ‘anything in the suggestion . . . that these were anything but genuine?’ Ahern replied:

They were not prepared by me . . . They were prepared by the trustees. They were prepared by a member of the Law Society [Gerry Brennan] and put to me to sign. And they were, if the suggestion by Mr O’Neill is that a member of the Law Society would produce some kind of bogus documents—the answer to that is certainly no.

Ahern’s counsel, Conor Maguire, intervened and said that, by raising the issue, O’Neill had tried to trap and ‘demean’ Ahern. O’Neill said he rejected the accusation, and Judge Mahon said he did not see the questioning as an attempt to set a trap. When O’Neill had finished his questioning, Maguire read out a letter from the tribunal to Ahern’s solicitors confirming that it was not investigating the ownership of St Luke’s or how it was acquired.

Maguire then read into the record the contents of another document that had been given to the tribunal in early 2008. The document was entitled ‘Attendance for the file’ and was signed by Gerry Brennan, with a date of 3 December 1987. It concerned the meeting that the tribunal was told was held in the Gresham Hotel on that date. It wasn’t among the documents Byrne received in the Law Library in 1997, although he said the matters recorded in the note would in effect have created a trust, since the meeting, as per the note, recorded the intention of the donors (the settlors) that the property to be bought with their money be held in trust. The document read:

I attended at the above meeting when it was confirmed that the contract for the purchase of 161 Lower Drumcondra Road had been signed. [The contract had been signed on 19 November.] After some discussion regarding the property and its development [and] after my advice to the meeting regarding the holding of the property in trust it was proposed and seconded that the following would take place:

No 1. That Joe Burke, Tim Collins, Paddy Reilly and Des Richardson and [Jimmy Keane, another Ahern associate] would be trustees if they so agreed to act.

No 2. That the property, when completed, would be held in the names of the trustees for the benefit of Fianna Fáil party in Drumcondra electoral constituency as it presently stood, with the discretion for the trustees to apply the trust property for the benefit of the party ensuring that the ultimate beneficiary of the trust would be the party.

It was also agreed and confirmed that the trustees would have the powers in relation to leasing, mortgaging, financing, development . . . and that the trustees would have full discretion to use and develop the property once the ultimate beneficiary was the party. Finally it was agreed by the meeting that I would act as solicitor in connection with the completion of the purchase and also in connection with the completion of the appropriate declaration of trust in accordance with the wishes of the meeting. After some brief discussion of the matter the meeting concluded.

In May 2008 Liam Cooper, a member of the O’Donovan Rossa Cumann since the 1980s and a former treasurer of the Dublin Central Comhairle Dáil Ceantair (constituency council), said he had never heard of the Gresham Hotel meeting until it was mentioned at the tribunal. He had raised the matter with Ahern after it had been brought up at the tribunal, and Ahern told him about it, he said. ‘And I believe him.’

Some time after Ahern’s and Byrne’s appearances at the tribunal, a solicitor, Sheena Beale, who had acted for St Luke’s when a mortgage was applied for in 1999, gave evidence. During Beale’s evidence O’Neill pointed out that the declaration that stated that the five men who had bought the house from Daly were holding it in trust had been filed and stamped by the Revenue Commissioners four years after the house had been bought. He said that normally a declaration of trust would be filed and stamped on the same day a property was transferred to its new owner. Beale agreed. The declaration of trust in relation to St Luke’s was dated 18 May 1988, the same date the property was assigned to the five Ahern supporters. However, it was not stamped by the Revenue Commissioners until four-and-a-half years later, by which time Ahern was Minister for Finance in the first Reynolds Government. By this time Ahern was also of the view that something would have to be done about St Luke’s in the light of the
Sunday Tribune
article so that when the opportunity next came round to be party leader he would be able to answer questions about its ownership and put any potential controversy to rest.

Chapter
4  

LOOT

I
n time, documents found in the archives of various banks used by Bertie Ahern, and calculations made by the tribunal concerning exchange rates on the day he made some of his deposits, served to challenge much of his story about dig-outs in Dublin and donations in Manchester. But it was an ancillary aspect of the evidence of the Dublin stockbroker Padraic O’Connor that brought about Ahern’s eventual downfall.

This evidence caused the tribunal to conduct a close examination of a number of bank accounts, including ones that Ahern had not disclosed in his original sworn affidavit of discovery (a list produced by the person making the affidavit, who swears that it contains all the items it should contain). Ahern was asked to list bank accounts held by him or into which money had been lodged for his benefit. His disclosure in relation to the second part of that order was incomplete.

The new evidence raised questions about whether or not Ahern had been pocketing money ostensibly raised to fund his political operation. Moreover—and this proved to be the killer blow—fresh and substantial foreign currency was discovered in one of Ahern’s personal accounts years after he had given exhaustive evidence about the source of the funds in his accounts (salary) and about any involvement he might have had with foreign currencies (almost none).

Both Padraic O’Connor and Des Richardson agreed in their evidence that the former was approached by the latter in late 1993 and asked for money and that some time later that money was paid. Richardson said that he approached O’Connor as part of his efforts in relation to the first dig-out for Ahern, which he said he had organised with Brennan, and that it was at all times clear to O’Connor that the money was for Ahern personally. He also said that at the end of the meeting he asked O’Connor if his firm,
NCB
Stockbrokers, would take out a table at a fund-raising dinner to be held in the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, to raise funds for Ahern’s O’Donovan Rossa Cumann.

O’Connor was the managing director of
NCB
Stockbrokers, and he said the money given to Richardson was a political donation from the firm, not a personal donation from him to Ahern. Richardson had told him, O’Connor said, that because Ahern had been appointed national treasurer of Fianna Fáil he had less time to raise funds for his constituency operation. Richardson, he added, told him he was approaching four or five parties with a view to collecting the annual running costs of St Luke’s. The total figure, he recalled, was in the region of £20,000–25,000, and
NCB
was asked to give £5,000. O’Connor said that he was not a close friend of Ahern’s in the sense presented by Ahern in his comments to the tribunal, the Dáil and the general public, and that he had no memory of being asked to attend the fund-raising dinner. Both men were forthright and clear in their evidence.