EDITORIAL & OPINION - Village Magazine

16 December-January 2014

EDITORIAL&OPINION

Also in this section:

Ansbacher Special 18

John Gormley on Una Mullally 34

Ivana Bacik on abuse 35

Sinéad Pentony on healthcare 36

Niall Crowley on private schools 39

Constantin Gurdgiev on weak

economy 40

Rachel Moran on the Sexual

Oﬀences Bill 43

EDITORIAL

Publish or ...

Anatomy of a whitewash

N the following pages Village publishes the

Ansbacher dossier which ‘Authorised Oﬃcer’ Gerard Ryan has

been attempting to submit to the Public Accounts Committee. We

print it because it seems to us there has been a whitewash to prevent

investigation of its mostly tightly documented allegations of widespread

oﬀshore untaxed bank accounts being held by the political ascendancy.

It’s time the role of lawyers, toﬀs, prosecutory authorities and a range

of political parties – and their grandees – in the debasement of Irish

society, was recognised. It’s been all too convenient to load all the blame

on the buccaneers in Fianna Fáil, but they were supported by the

professional establishment and the local gombeens of international

ﬁnance. The Ryan dossier paints a picture which its compiler clearly feels

extends to the contemporary.

Most of the substance is printed in Village, though it has been

necessary to redact a lot. A few tracts have been edited out, and the

appendices omitted, for reasons of space.

In publishing, we are conﬁdent that we have avoided defaming anyone

and have attempted to be fair to all, alive or dead. In this context we note

that Mary Harney has claimed that she closed down Ryan’s investigation

only after it got bogged down and only to ensure that it was not waylaid

after she left oﬃce. “I made it clear, regardless of who might have been

involved, it had to be investigated correctly and thoroughly”, she has

said, adding that departmental records would prove this, that the

bonuses oﬀered were entirely bona ﬁde and that she did not direct that

letters drafted by Ryan not be sent to Des O’Malley, Ray Burke and Liam

Lawlor. Des O’Malley has said he opened a Guinness and Mahon account

only as a blind trust to ensure his business aﬀairs were handled at arm’s

length while he was a Minister. The family of Declan Costello has

asserted that he opened his (onshore) account because the main banks

were on strike at the time (1976), and he needed to bank a recent

inheritance. The transactions appendixed to the dossier are certainly

compellingly consistent with this. The Moriarty and Mahon Tribunals

are no doubt unimpeachable.

Village is well aware that it is illegal under s21 of the 1990 Companies

Act to publish or disclose any information, book or document relating to

a body obtained by an authorised oﬃcer under the Act. We have

therefore removed ‘information’ relating to it. Happily moreover, Mr

Ryan and other media have beaten us to Ansbacher. There is no

diﬀerence in law between publishing the dossier and publishing extracts

or summaries of it, if they relate to Ansbacher.

So the Irish Times has reported that Ryan “had discovered in 2003

records of a deposit account in Guinness and Mahon in the name of

Declan Costello…Mr Ryan suggested in the dossier that Mr Costello had

had “a major undisclosed conﬂict of interest” while he led the High Court

investigation into the company”.

The Irish Independent reported that the Ryan dossier claims:

• “Declan Costello held an account with Guinness & Mahon bank,

which was at the centre of the oﬀshore tax evasion scandal.

• Former Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael ministers held Ansbacher accounts,

which were not revealed by an investigation into the oﬀshore tax evasion

scheme.

• The Moriarty Tribunal did not properly investigate Ansbacher – a

state of aﬀairs that undermines the integrity of the tribunal and the

reliability of its ﬁndings.

• Des Traynor was the accountant who set up oshore Ansbacher

accounts, allowing hundreds of well-heeled individuals to evade tax.

“Mr Declan Costello had a major conﬂict of interest”.

And the Sunday Times has printed allegations of a “cover up”; and

named Helen Downes as being in charge of updating the ‘black briefcase

ﬁles’ where “the names of the Cayman account holders were kept in a

separate safe from the lists of their ‘very substantial’ account balances,

to avoid any chance of the senior politicians being identiﬁed”.

Some of the dossier appears unfair and we have eliminated it.

Unlike many media we have not unfairly reiterated the names of

alleged Cayman account holders that have entered the public domain

– as they were received by the Authorised Oﬃcer as mere hearsay from a

junior employee in Ansbacher. Not, in any event, that all Cayman

account holders failed to pay tax.

Furthermore we believe the Authorised Oﬃcer makes some inferences

about Costello and O’Malley that are not justiﬁed by the evidence

adduced in the rest of the dossier. Nor does he prove his allegations that

the Moriarty and perhaps Mahon tribunals were compromised in their

lack of zeal in pursuit of Ansbacher, though Village has always

questioned the extent to which the tribunal reports managed to probe

and explicate all the allegations presented to them, even if in the end the

tribunal reports were aﬀorded a blind imprimatur by a gormless press.

The tribunals were inert in the absence of investigatory powers, with

Mahon in particular relying too much on unreliably dysfunctional

whistleblowers, and ultimately toppling too few among the still

powerful.

It is necessary also to be fair to the prosecutors: one of the problems

for authorities is that the investigations came too late and were

hampered by the blanket immunities conferred by a cynical tax amnesty

in 1993, though Revenue still expects to extract €250m from

recalcitrants. The gardai did in fact investigate ‘Ansbacher’ but not the

secret ‘black briefcase’ with its dozens of allegedly dodgy accounts. The

fraud squad was advised such an investigation would be barred under

the terms of Bertie Ahern’s 1997 Taxes Consolidation Act which

prohibits them or the Revenue prosecuting oﬀences more than ten-years

old; and the DPP decided not to prosecute the more general claims of

Ryan, following submission of a Garda ﬁle.

The Ryan dossier is creditable but it remains unresolved. Uniquely we

have published it – in the hope this might help this process. We have

published but we have been careful and fair. We do not expect to be

damned. •

Whitewash