Gavin's Blog

So asked Prime Time in September 1999. Of course the names were released… three years later. I recently put the entire Ansbacher report back online, after seven years of it being unavailable. I also posted the list of all account holders.

What is interesting about this, is the voxpop at the start. There was anger, there was a demand for accountability. It pretty much never happened. Indeed one of the Ansbacher account holders, Clayton Love Jnr, only this year made full settlement of €1.4m with the Revenue. There was no jailing or prosecutions.

Accountability? You must be joking.

I am now back from hiatus.

Given the day that’s in it, as the Moriarty Tribunal reconvenes for more public sittings, it might be worth noting the following.

Financier Dermot Desmond first became involved with Denis O’Brien when his venture capital firm IIU underwrote the Esat Digifone consortium’s bid for the state’s second mobile phone licence to the tune of £6m in 1995. Explaining his reasoning for assuming a risk other institutional investors would not, Mr Desmond told the Moriarty tribunal in 2004 how he had relished the challenge it presented to him. “Unlike the conditional interest expressed by the proposed institutional investors, I was prepared to take the downside as well as the up.

“Denis may be a Goliath now but he was a David then and I like helping the Davids of this world,” he said. The risk Mr Desmond took paid off handsomely, with IIU going on to realise some €100m from its stake in Esat following the company’s sale in 2000.

And this week:

Esat Digifone, founded by businessman Denis O’Brien, said it would be 40 per cent owned by O’Brien’s Communicorp group, and 40 per cent owned by Norwegian group Telenor. The remaining 20 per cent would be placed with four named institutional investors, it said.

However, in April 1996, as the department was preparing to issue the licence, it was told the institutional investors had been replaced by Dermot Desmond’s IIU Nominees Ltd.

The civil servants involved in the process sought legal advice as to whether the licence could be issued to Esat, given the divergence between its shareholding then and the intended shareholding outlined in the original bid.

In time, the licence was issued. The tribunal has made adverse findings against the department related to this. The legal advice furnished to the department came from Richard Nesbitt SC, a member of its legal team at the tribunal.

IIU Nominees was registered as a company in November 1995. In June 1997 a charge was registered against the company, via an overdraft facility provided by AIB.

Here is the charge:

I am not sure how this charge relates to the current story, but it is all interesting nonetheless.

Here is the full document:

IIU Nominees debt charge

I can’t say I’m not pleased. Fianna Fail policies since 1997 have bankrupted the country. I am pleased the auctioneer councillor I ran from my door, Maurice Ahern (Cork), appears to have failed to get elected.

I will be relatively quiet for the rest of June, I overloaded on the Ryan Report/Election/Anglo/Party funding stories. Time for a time out.

From the RTE archives. September 30, 2003. Michael Woods is interviewed about the indemnity deal. Up to now it’s been sitting somewhere without a link on the RTE website, I pulled it off.

First, an analysis of the C&AG’s annual report 2002, which questioned the indemnity deal:

Then, the Michael Woods interview. Hold onto your hats.

Miriam: The report suggested today we could be looking at a bill of 1 billion. Was that a good deal you brokered?

Woods: That is a guesstimate by the Comptroller and Auditor General. He has made his own sums up and says what he thinks might be the case. As you read out there, he says that the average is going to be 96,000 and multiplied it by 10,000 and all this kind of thing, and got the figure.”

Actually even the Comptroller was off by a fair bit. It turned into 15,000 victims of abuse, and a €1.2bn bill. Mathematics, Mr Woods, mathematics. Here is the report being talked about. But then what would the Comptroller know about figures compared to Dr Woods?

Some more choice quotes:

“The State carries the major responsibility, there’s no doubt in my mind about that”

“The country will be glad in time that this shadow on the people of Ireland has been lifted – because it was done by the people”

Just to emphasise that final bit, I recorded the last 2 minutes in a separate video:

No, Mr Woods, it was done by the religious. And you blame us.

You did a secret sweetheart deal with the religious. Resign your seat and disappear with your gold plated pension. I never want to hear from you again you fool. You were either incompetent or complicit.

Resign.

I watched this on Questions & Answers last night. I can’t add anything.

Take a look at this explanatory note:

Conditions to be Satisfied to Avail of the Section 54 Exemption

4.1 Revenue will now apply the gift tax exemption under the “public purposes” provisions of section 54 CATA, 1976, to political donations that meet the various conditions and requirements under the Electoral Acts. These include the requirements that the donation;

• is made to a political party, a member of either House of the Oireachtas, a candidate at a Dail, Seanad, European or Presidential Election,
• does not exceed the maximum permissible limit of €2,539.48 (£2,000) for individual politicians/candidates and €6,348.69 (£5,000) for political parties in any given year or in the context of any specific Dail, Seanad, European or Presidential Election,
• is not anonymous (unless less than €126.97(£100)) or prohibited (e.g. from a person residing outside Ireland other than an Irish Citizen).
• is of a type set out in section 22(2)(a)(i) of the Electoral Act, 1997 e.g. a donation of money, a donation of property or goods, the supply of a service free or for less than full commercial price, etc. and • that the donation is expended on political purposes (as defined in section 49(b) of the Electoral Act, 2001 – see Appendix) whether in the context of an election or otherwise.

Did Fianna Fail pay gift tax on the Durkan New Homes donation?

On Monday, an Irish Examiner report revealed that Fianna Fail had failed to disclose donations from some of the country’s biggest developers: Ballymore Properties and Durkan New Homes. The news has been greeted with apparent silence elsewhere in the media. I have to wonder why.

It strikes me as important given that electoral law looks to have been broken, and Fianna Fail have responded with rather nonsensical denials that anything untoward has happened.

The information was revealed only because of a series of requests and an FOI request, that up until this year, had never been performed by anyone. Other companies turned up in the trawl, including:

Mosney Irish Holidays
MP Administration
Bridford Properties
Omega Aviation Services
Beechill Growers
Airscape Limited
Harcourt Developments Limited
Garland Homes
Harte Designs
Burgrove Limited
Williams Motor Warehouse
Seabass Limited
Poplar Linens Trading Company
O’Riain Associates International
McGettigan Construction Limited

These donations were declared under the Companies Act and Electoral Act, but the amounts given were not known until this week. They are not the only companies.

I know probably more than most that looking at a list of limited companies is not very appealing. So it is perhaps helpful to look behind the companies, who directs them, and then trawl newspaper archives to see what business they have been involved in.

Ballymore is famous enough, Sean Mulryan is one of the country’s best known developers. But what of the others? Let’s start digging. First up: Burgrove Limited.

[Disclosure: I work for the Irish Examiner]

Where PDFs of reports come from scanned documents, with this all over the place:

Anthony rightly lambasts the Government on the censored Monageer Report.

Can anyone really say we live in a properly functioning democracy?