Estd. 2002. Politics, tech, startups, media, law, history, philosophy
My geekiness appears to know no bounds. This weekend I travel to London to attend several events:
* I hope to get to Open Tech 2009 on Saturday.
* Then the Travelling geeks Tweetup on Sunday.
* And then the Reboot Britain conference on Monday.
And I have my eyes on the Personal Democracy Forum event in Barcelona this November.
You’d swear I worked at this stuff… This trip to London is my summer holiday… 🙂
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.
This appears to be fresh out of Iran via BBC Persian. It appears to show Basij militia firing on unarmed protesters. It’s pretty raw footage, so viewer discretion is advised.
A 6 minute graphic video with music. Some very graphic scenes. It portrays the first week or so of protests.
It is interesting: all recorded by amateurs, produced and edited and put online for the consumption of the entire world. Total monetary cost: next to nothing. Amazing world we live in.
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.
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:
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.