Whistleblowing until your cheeks lock and you have to sit down

December - January  3

EDITORIAL

Issue 51

December - January 2017

Village Magazine promotes

in its columns the fair

distribution of resources,

welfare, respect and

opportunity by the analysis

and investigation of

inequalities, unsustainable

development and

corruption, and the media’s

role in their perpetuation;

and by acute cultural

analysis.

ONLINE

www.villagemagazine.ie

@VillageMagIRE

EDITOR

Michael Smith

editor@villagemagazine.ie

ADVERTISING

sales@village.ie

+   

DESIGN  PRODUCTION

Eoghan Carroll

INTERNS

Matthew Farrelly

Paul Verdeau

EDITORIAL BOARD

Niall Crowley, Joan Fitzpatrick,

Bride Rosney, Michael Smith

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Niall Crowley, John Gormley

PRINTERS

Boylans, Drogheda,

Co Louth

VILLAGE IS PUBLISHED BY:

Ormond Quay Publishing

6 Ormond Quay Upper,

Dublin 7

The Irish media and national politicians are

facilitating cover-ups of a range of issues –

from the issues missed by feeble tribunals

to Sugarman, Ansbacher, CRH and

planning in Donegal

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ILLAGE AIMS TO promote equality, sustaina-

bility and accountability/transparency.

Not being so ideological the accountabil-

ity/transparency agenda is often perceived

as dry. The Cinderella.

While many countries have their political weak spots

in these fascist-tickling post-truth times, unserious Ire

land runs a particularly fragile regime when it comes to

impropriety. One of the intended purposes of Village

magazine is to get to the bottom of many of the corrup-

tions that other media, lazy, conservative or sometimes

beholden, keep from public view.

This magazine considers that the political process has

abjured action on the biggest corruption issues of our

time. Report after report, inquiry after inquiry has been

celebrated by the media though the reports rarely nailed

the truth, and

even more rarely

generated com-

prehensive remedial

action. From Morris to

Smithwick to Fennelly to

O’Neill to Cregan, investiga-

tions of our delinquent Garda if not

abortive have uncovered bits and pieces but rarely the

whole picture and clearly the follow-ups have been nuga-

tory. From the Beef Tribunal report, which was tailored

to advance its judicial author's career, to the Moriarty

Tribunal's defanged findings on Denis O'Brien, to the

vastly discredited Planning Tribunal, our major non-

Garda investigations too have been skewed, undefinitive

and unreforming.

HERE ARE a few minor scandals that Village has

highlighted that attracted extraordinarily little

interest elsewhere. These issues are mostly of

interest for what they symptomise.

• The mistreatment by the Law Society of complaints

against its members, including the unduly zealous

undermining of solicitor Colm Murphy. The Phoenix

and Sunday Business Post gave some space to Mur-

phy's case. Nothing elsewhere.

• Difficulties dating back thirty years at the Irish Red

Cross which has been run amateurishly and in the

shadow of one dominant volunteer have been sup

pressed by the national media.

•

The overpayment and conflicts of interests of the

former CEO of the Royal Institute of the Architects of

Ireland, John Graby, have not troubled the national

discourse. The Irish Times and Sunday Business Post

gave it a little, unexcited coverage but nothing

elsewhere.

What unites these issues is that the media are well

disposed to the stalwart institutions complained of,

and so underreport the issues.

This also explains why the series of articles pub-

lished by Village in 2010 about conflicts of interests

for then Councillor Oisín Quinn in Dublin City Council

were downplayed and distorted in the media. Quinn

is a presentable and progressive pro-business Labour

Party barrister from a wealthy family with an agenda

attuned to those of our conservative media. Quinn had

not seen the importance, for ethics and ethics legisla-

tion, of absenting yourself from discussions on

matters the determination of which affects your mate-

rial interest. Quinn’s failure was concededly a minor

breach and the actions were not in bad faith. What was

extraordinary is the absence of interest from the

press, some of which went to great lengths to sustain

misreports of the findings of the Standards in Public

Office in the matter.

A not dissimilar case figured in the last edition of

Village where Councillor Fiona O'Loughlin in Kildare

County Council voted money for a worthy organisation

established in memory of her father and chaired by

her brother. The entire Council rallied around the

Fianna Fáil Councillor. When another Councillor, Fiona

McLoughlin Healy, raised the issue of a conflict of

interest she suffered a series of disavowals, including

from her own Fine Gael Party, that has resulted in her

quite outrageous suspension from the party. The local

press can’t see the issue. The national press have

taken no interest.

These issues define a certain media laxity. For Vil

lage though there are several enormous issues we

have covered that have entirely escaped political

accountability. They are on a different scale. These are

Sugarman, Ansbacher, CRH and planning in

Donegal.

Whistleblowing until

your cheeks lock and you

have to sit down

4 December - January 

EDITORIAL

INISTER MARY Harney first appointed

senior civil servant Gerry Ryan as an

authorised officer to investigate the tax

evasion scheme operated by Guinness & Mahon

and its subsidiary, Ansbacher (Cayman) Ltd, in

1998. In July 1999 the High Court, at her request,

appointed inspectors to investigate the Irish

business of Ansbacher (Cayman) Ltd The inves-

tigation was headed by the late Declan Costello,

former TD, Attorney General and President of the

High Court, until he resigned for health reasons

in 2000. It found that Guinness & Mahon (Ire

land) Ltd and its former managing director, Des

Traynor had promoted a scheme of tax evasion

in Ireland through offshore trusts and that Ans

bacher (Cayman) Ltd had operated as an

unlicensed bank in this country (including from

the offices of Cement Roadstone Holdings (CRH)

in Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin for many years).

In 2003, Ryan discovered that Costello had

held a deposit account in Guinness & Mahon

from 1976 to 1978 containing £15,000 which was

managed by Traynor. When contacted by Ryan,

Costello denied ever having such an account or

having dealt with Traynor. Ryan claimed that the

High Court investigation was compromised by

what he described in the dossier circulated in

2014 as Costello’s “major conflict of interest”.

In June 2004, four months after Ryan informed

Minister Harney that he had uncovered evidence

that a close associate of hers had an Ansbacher

(Cayman) account his investigation was closed

down and his request to complete it was refused.

Her successor, Micheál Martin, also refused a

similar request in early 2005. In July of that year

Ryan told Martin that a “huge effort was made

by certain persons” to ensure that evidence of

the Cayman Island accounts held by senior

Fianna Fáil TDs never came to light. Martin

directed Ryan to name those persons, provide

details of when and how each made a huge effort

to ensure that the evidence never came to light

and to substantiate this in writing to him.

In November 2007, a 763-page report was

delivered to the minister having been approved

for release by John Hennessy SC. It was for-

warded to the Garda Bureau of Fraud

Investigation, the Office of the Director of Corpo-

rate Enforcement, the Revenue Commissioners

and the Moriarty and Mahon tribunals. Only the

Revenue Commissioners met Ryan to discuss its

contents. A later report providing details of what

happened to the accounts of the Fianna Fáil TDs

in 1992 was sent to another minister, Batt

O’Keeffe, in November 2010 and he passed it on

to the same agencies, again with no result. In

March 2011, the new minister, Richard Bruton,

also failed to reply to a letter from Ryan

requesting a meeting to discuss the Cayman

accounts while the Attorney General Maire

Whelan also neglected to respond to similar

correspondence.

“The fact that this evidence has been with

these authorities for at least 8 years and no pro-

gress has been made in its investigation

amounts to a cover up of the evidence of wrong-

doing. It is in the public interest that the

wrongdoing associated with the senior Fianna

Fáil TDs’ (and at least one Fine Gael minister’s)

very secret Ansbacher accounts be properly

investigated”, Ryan argued in his submissions.

We have waited 20 months for Ryan's prom-

ised next move given that his attempt to bring

his dossier of sensational claims to the PAC was

closed down and that the effort by Mary Lou

McDonald to reveal some of its spicier details

was stifled by her parliamentary colleagues in

2015.

The Taoiseach said that it is up to the Garda

fraud unit to decide on the next course of action

but this never came to anything. All of the press

were diverted into thinking the case was about

the names on the list rather than about a con-

spiracy to ensure those names never came out,

or were prosecuted.

And now the issue is dead.

Ansbacher

Sugarman at a press conference in December

Sugarman

and the banks

S LONG ago as 2010 Village ran a cover

story explaining how Jonathan Sugar-

man, a risk manager in Ireland for

Italy's biggest bank Unicredit, had discov-

ered outrageous breaches of Central Bank

liquidity requirements which his bank, and

perhaps the Central Bank, suppressed.

Since all our major banks had the same

requirements and all ran into problems there

must have been similar breaches in every

case. It is a scandal that none of our several

banking inquiries, including the Oireachtas

one in 2016, packed full of our political

finest, deigned to look into this dysfunction-

ality - for it led to a national banking liquidity

emergency that led to the bank guarantee

that will cost this country over €30bn net:

over €7000 per head of our population.

What is extraordinary is how, apart from

the Sunday Business Post, none of our

national media have pursued this story. TV3

and RTE's 'Drivetime' interviewed Sugarman

in early December but it was seven years too

late and their media peers continue to ignore

the story that explains the €30bn.

December - January  5

HE 1969 merger of Irish Cement and Road-

stone created Ireland’s biggest company

but at the expense of the public and its

many SME competitors in Ireland. The merger

allowed the new Cement Roadstone Holdings

(CRH) to integrate both vertically and horizon-

tally thus allowing it to gouge artificially high

prices for cement and explosives on the one

hand whilst using its market power to evict all

before it through the use of margin squeeze,

banking embargos and other predatory

tactics.

Back in 1988, 'Prime Time'’s precursor 'Today

Tonight' did an excellent exposé on CRH’s dirty

tricks and uncovered prima facie evidence of

cartels in several of its markets, together with

a host of predatory practices. CRH’s then senior

executive Declan Doyle denied the practices on

air and CRH was taken to the High Court by two

courageous families, the O’Regan s from Cork

and the Quirkes from Kerry, amid allegations of

defamation. CRH came up with a then record

settlement on the steps of the High Court.

Despite the RTE revelations, the State took no

action. And RTE’s hands have been well and

truly tied since then.

In 1994, there was what should have been a

defining moment: the European Commission

fined 42 European cement-makers ECU250m.

The Commission found that Irish Cement

played a lead role in fixing prices and dividing

European cement markets. At a cartel meeting

in January 1983, the Chairman noted that: “Our

Irish colleagues have described the threats to

their domestic market and have asked for my

help”. At a later cartel meeting in March 1984,

the Irish Cement delegate Diarmuid Quirke

noted of the Irish situation: “As the country

which had started these discussions, Ireland

had a duty to request that they be continued as

they had been extremely useful in calming the

situation in Ireland”, i.e. in blocking cement

imports into Ireland.

Despite incontrovertible evidence of CRH’s

cartel activities, no action was taken against

CRH even though the State was one the biggest

users of cement and other construction materi-

als. The Examiner of Restrictive Practices

turned a blind eye to complaints and the Com-

petition Authority has been awash with

complaints since it was set up in 1991. In 1999,

a Sunday Independent investigation confirmed

that CRH operated a web of secretly-controlled

downstream companies and named four. There

were, indeed are, several more. The British-

based Mergers and Monopolies Commission

once described secretly owned subsidiaries as:

“fighting-companies, that is to say a company

which is a member of a group, but whose own

ership is concealed from the public; the

fighting-company can then be used to attack a

competitor’s customers by offering them

favourable terms and conditions”.

In fairness to economist Pat Massey who was

the Director of Competition Enforcement, he

immediately sought funding from Government

to instigate an investigation into CRH and the

building materials sector but promptly resigned

his position in February 2000 when the required

funding was not forthcoming.

In December 2001, John Fingleton, then

Chairman of the Competition Authority, stated

that: “There was no enforcement of Competi-

tion Law in Ireland at all until 1996” and “Small

concrete producers became proxies for the con-

sumer”. However, in May 2002, Dr Fingleton

wrote that the Competition Authority would not

be investigating the sector but “will continue to

monitor the cement sector generally”.

In February 2000, enterprise minister, Mary

Harney, met with members of the 'The Quarry

and Concrete Family Alliance' which was pursu-

ing complaints over the abuse of its monopoly

power by CRH.

She assured them that the Competition

Authority and the Director of the Office of Cor-

porate Enforcement, Paul Appleby, would

examine CRH and its behaviour. She suggested

they also make a submission to the Moriarty

Tribunal about the circumstances surrounding

the controversial acquisition by CRH of a large

quarry at Glen Ding in county Wicklow in 1991.

No investigation by either of the agencies she

suggested ensued following the meeting with

Harney while the Moriarty tribunal also

declined to investigate Glen Ding. In 2004,

Harney agreed to meet the Family Alliance again

but cancelled the arrangement without

explanation.

In 2004, Pat Rabbitte asked that a market

study be conducted into the sector. Dr Fingleton

responded that there was no funding available

until the following year. Again there was no

follow through and no study.

The stream of complaints continued. The

takeovers continued. Kilsaran bought Tracy

Enterprises amid a flurry of objections. Whistle-

blower Barry Goode’s evidence given in 2011

appears to have been binned. Other potential

whistleblowers have been discouraged by the

Authority. The Authority stood idly by when

CRH, Readymix and Kilsaran mounted the latest

predatory assault which involved a sustained

campaign of below-cost selling that wiped out

minority shareholder value in Readymix

[Cemex].

In April 2011, gardaí from the Bureau of Fraud

Investigation attached to the Authority

informed the Goode family that: “there isn’t a

hope of the Authority investigating this behav

iour (concrete and cement cartel) because of

who you are up against and what’s at stake”.

In October 2011, the Authority told the Goode

family and their solicitor: “that if the Authority

were to carry out any investigation, the Author

ity was only going to investigate small

companies similar to their own and stated they

would not go after the major companies (CRH

and Cemex)”.

In 2015 the Competition Authority, now called

the CCPC, announced an investigation into, and

dawn raid upon, CRH subsidiary, Irish Cement.

The investigation continues amid recrimination

and litigation which has resulted in the fruits of

the dawn raid being deemed inadmissible.

However, the investigation concerns only

bagged cement, not CRH's wider operations.

SENIOR COUNSEL, Rory Mulcahy, on

behalf of the Department of the Environ-

ment, is currently conducting a 'review'

into allegations from former senior planner

Gerard Convie of dodgy planning in Donegal.

Convie worked in Donegal County Council as

a senior planner for nearly 24 years. He has

claimed in an affidavit opened in court, as well

as to the Department of the Environment’s

review, that during his tenure in the Council there

was bullying and intimidation of planners who

sought to make decisions based exclusively on

the planning merits of particular applications

and that planning irregularities were perpe

trated by named officials at the highest level in

the Council. He claims to have a list of more than

20 "suspect cases" and has also named county

councillors and former Manager Michael

McLoone. It is not clear if the Mulcahy 'review'

will address impropriety or just ‘bad practice’.

However if it does not address impropriety it is

possible that Convie whose allegations have

already been actionably pooh-poohed by a Min-

ister, leading to a payment to Convie, may

consider he has again to return to court to defend

his name as a serious complainant - in view of

the fact he has raised allegations that indubita-

bly are about corruption or impropriety.

Meanwhile Michael McLoone is vigorously

pursuing a High Court defamation case in front

of a jury against the editor of this magazine, per

sonally, for printing the substance of the

allegations made by Convie to the Department

of the Environment’s review. The enormously

expensive case is expected to take a full week in

the Spring of 2017.

Why is there no media interest in this?

Why is there no media interest in any of this?

Anti-competitive CRH

Planning in Donegal