14 November 2014
for instance, that Justice Moriarty had
£500,000 worth of shares in CRH that in
his opinion precluded him from investigat-
ing the company. Now it emerges eminent
progressive turned President of the High
Court, Declan Costello, who investigated the
bank’s Cayman operation as a High Court
inspector in 2000 had a domestic Ansbacher
(ie Guinness and Mahon) account though he
had ‘forgotten’ it when denying it to Ryan. He
resigned as inspector citing ill health, He
died in 2011.
Ansbacher bank became a household
name in Ireland from stories emerging from
the McCracken Tribunal in 1997 as it uncov-
ered a complex series of payments from
Ben Dunne to Charles Haughey that even-
tually landed in Ansbacher bank, formerly
the Cayman Islands branch of Guinness &
Mahon Bank. The accounts were run by
Haughey’s bagman Des Traynor and John
Furze, an English-born banker who ran the
Cayman Islands end of the venture. Furze’s
career was straight out of a John le Carré
novel. He was instrumental in establishing
the offshore banking system in the Cayman
Islands, arriving there in 1967 at the age
of 25. When his name was first mentioned
in the Irish Times in 1996, the paper wrote
that it considered Furze to be a fictitious
name. Another early Irish Times report on
the island referred to John Grisham’s novel
‘The Firm’ for context. Yet by 1996, Des
Traynor was already dead, and Furze had
travelled to Ireland for the funeral and to
remove paperwork from Traynor’s office at
T
HE vast sums accruing to the 1%
present at least one problem for the
most avaricious: how to hide their
money. With vast amounts of wealth invested
in property it may be the case that offshore
accounts, tax evasion and property bubbles
are not unconnected. The return to life of
the Ansbacher investigation into offshore
accounts held by senior Irish politicians
and businesspeople from the 1970s to the
mid-1990s reminds us how things used to
be done. Some might argue that little has
changed.
Under the new protected disclosure legis-
lation, serving civil servant Gerry Ryan, who
began investigating the Ansbacher accounts
in 1997, has contacted the Public Accounts
Committee to voice concerns that tax eva-
sion among high-ranking politicians with
offshore accounts was not properly inves-
tigated. Mary Lou McDonald said they
were “household names” from Fianna Fáil,
Fine Gael and the Progressive Democrats.
Responding to the disclosure, the govern-
ment said that the files had already been
forwarded to the “relevant authorities”
which apparently did not include the Gardaí,
as Minister Richard Bruton finally forwarded
the files to Gardaí on Monday 10 November.
Ansbacher was closely associated with CRH,
the giant Irish business which has connec-
tions across almost all political parties. In ‘A
History of Scandal’, (Village Oct/Nov 2012),
Michael Smith outlined a series of serious
instances of failure of the “relevant authori-
ties” to lay a finger on CRH; it materialised,
CRH. Furze died in July 1997 following heart
surgery and by that stage he had destroyed
much of the paperwork.
A full 200 customers of the bank were
identified in a 2002 report but no prosecu-
tions resulted. Revenue later cited a number
of reasons for not bringing prosecutions,
including the lack of original documentation,
an inability to compel Cayman Island entities
to release documents, and the elapse of more
than 10 years in bringing cases. Despite the
criminal-law inertia, by the end of 2012
the Revenue Commissioners had recovered
more than €112 million in unpaid taxes and
penalties, (an Irish solution to a Cayman
Islands problem) but now it appears other
names have been identified and efforts by
Gerry Ryan to recover documents that may
have aided a prosecution were stymied.
The return of Ansbacher reminds us
of the scale of tax evasion and tax avoid-
ance on a personal and corporate scale.
The recent ‘Lux:eaks’ story involves
PriceWaterhouseCooper, several of the
world’s biggest corporations, and the now
European Commission President Jean-
Claude Juncker, who was Prime Minister in
Luxembourg for much of the relevant period
from 2008 to 2010, and after a short period
in apparent hiding he has now emerged to
“take responsibility” for the “unethical” pol-
icy, and possibly spear Ireland’s Corporation
Tax policy. Interestingly, when the story
broke, the Cayman Compass news website
promptly issued an editorial in support of
Juncker.
Documents obtained by the International
Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)
and released in early November showed Irish
companies among hundreds of businesses
using Luxembourg as a tax haven. By routing
Inflated property prices linked to offshore
trusts. By Rónán Lynch
Ansbacher back:
the Caymans,
LuxLeaks,
Offshore Leaks
and WikiLeaks
off shore
accounts
NEWS ANSBACHER