Bertie Ahern: The Man Who Blew the Boom: Power & Money (11 page)

Celia Larkin was head of our constituency office. She was the senior person in our constituency office and had been for many years. She was known to all of the officers, and known to all of the house committee; had been a senior officer in a neighbouring constituency in previous times. She was a person who ran for Fianna Fáil in local elections. She was a person who served on the National Youth Committee of Fianna Fáil. She was a person of good standing in Fianna Fáil. And her family had a difficulty.

It was on that basis that the money was given, he said.

Ahern said that, to the best of his recollection, he first learnt of the matter after Larkin had completed the purchase of the house. He was unsure whether Brennan, Ahern’s friend and solicitor, had acted for Larkin in the purchase. (Documents in the Registry of Deeds showed that he had.) There was no charge on the house deeds registering the loan, but Ahern said he imagined that if Brennan had been involved there would be a document somewhere recording the loan. No such document was ever produced. Asked when the loan had been repaid, Ahern said, ‘I asked one of the officers yesterday, and they said in the period since Christmas.’

Under questioning from O’Neill, Ahern agreed that Larkin had not worked in St Luke’s since 1987: since that date she had been working in his offices in Leinster House and Government Buildings. According to Ahern, ‘she did all the work on the annual fund-raising dinner. So she worked with the House Committee. She did all of the organisation of the annual dinner. So she worked with that committee.’

O’Neill proceeded to ask Ahern about other withdrawals from the
B
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account. Some, Ahern said, were for annual functions held in St Luke’s, including functions held for the persons who contributed the money to buy it.

In the early years they had a dinner with the trustees who were the 25 people or so that formed the trust to purchase St Luke’s in the first place. And some of the people that were involved in the construction of St Luke’s. They had an annual dinner for the first three or four years . . . The dinner for the trustees ceased somewhere along the way. They didn’t continue that.

He agreed that there were common rules that applied to each Comhairle Dáil Ceantair and that these rules included the stipulation that there must be two treasurers overseeing each constituency’s financial affairs. He also agreed that the
B
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account was not a Comhairle Dáil Ceantair account and was therefore not under the control of the Dublin Central treasurers. The account was under the control of the cumann, he said, ‘but the treasurers would have been aware of that.’ No document to support this statement was ever produced. The account, in fact, was not under the control of any cumann. The O’Donovan Rossa Cumann had about twenty to twenty-five members, Ahern agreed, and neither Tim Collins nor any of the other ‘trustees’ were members.

Ahern was asked about his conversation with Collins before he gave evidence. O’Neill asked if Collins had told him that he had other accounts in the Irish Permanent, Drumcondra, and Ahern said he had. He said he hadn’t asked Collins if he had any joint accounts in the branch. He gave a similar reply when asked if Des Richardson had any accounts in the Irish Permanent in Drumcondra.

Ahern’s evidence was that he was busy trying to balance his obligations to the tribunal with his busy schedule as Taoiseach and that his constituency organisers and the surviving trustees of St Luke’s had independently decided that they would deal directly with the tribunal rather than doing so through him. Furthermore, his evidence was to the effect that this stance was adopted against his wishes.

Evidence heard later by the tribunal strongly questioned this claim and showed that this whole apparent development was something that Ahern controlled at all times. It seemed that he was using tricks he had learnt over the course of his political career. These manoeuvres bought him time, but in the end they were no match for the tribunal’s powers of discovery and its right to call witnesses. This no doubt contributed to the frustration and anger that was at times evident during the closing period of his tenure. He was Taoiseach, but that fact couldn’t save him.

Chapter
5  

THE BOOKKEEPER’S BOOKS

I
n the spring of 2001 Ronan Murphy, a senior partner with the accountancy firm Price Waterhouse Coopers, met the trustees of Fianna Fáil in relation to the annual audit of its accounts. Murphy’s firm had audited the head office and party leader’s accounts for many years. Among those present at the meeting was Bertie Ahern, the Minister for Finance and a party trustee and treasurer. A few weeks after the meeting Murphy was contacted by Fianna Fáil head office and told to expect a call from Ahern. In the event he was called by Sandra Cullagh from St Luke’s, and when he went to see her she told him that Ahern wanted an account of the Dublin Central constituency brought up to date.

Murphy and some colleagues proceeded to conduct an exercise with one of the constituency accounts, the constituency No. 1 account. It wasn’t an audit but an income and expenditure statement. This meant that, working on whatever documentary evidence or oral explanations were available, the accountants drafted a document showing, and giving explanations for, the flow of money into and out of the account. The explanations for the sources of the income, and the reasons for the expenditures, were accepted at face value and were not independently verified by the accountants.

The account had been opened in 1983, and the accountants were asked to do the accounts preparation work for each year since. Murphy saw where Ahern himself had started to do some of the work before engaging
PWC
. The accountants were given a suitcase full of documents linked to the account. However, although they were told that all lodgements to the account arose from political fund-raising, there was no documentary evidence to support this statement or which identified particular donors.

The bill for bringing the account up to date (that is, to 2001) was £2,950, and the
PWC
invoice, at Ahern’s suggestion, was sent to Fianna Fáil head office for payment. The exercise was repeated each year thereafter, up to 2005.

The account that Murphy did the work on was in the names of Joe Burke and Bertie Ahern, but all the information he received came from Ahern directly, or from him through Cullagh. Ahern gave Murphy no explanation for wanting the work carried out or of what the account was for.

Murphy was not told about other bank accounts that would later come to the attention of the tribunal. He was not told about the
B
/
T
account, the account called the
CODR
account or the account into which money arising from the sale of the Amiens Street building had been lodged. Nor was Murphy told about a deposit account and a current account maintained by the Comhairle Dáil Ceantair.

When he later gave evidence to the tribunal, Murphy accepted that the exercise he and his colleagues had conducted could not be considered a picture of the income and expenditure of the Ahern constituency operation, because
PWC
had not been told about the other accounts. It was a picture of income and expenditure through one particular account. In so far as it might be presented as a picture of the income and expenditure of the constituency, it had no value. Des O’Neill, counsel for the tribunal, said it had been told that there were another seven accounts that held funds relevant to the constituency operation, and he put it to Murphy that, on that basis, the exercise conducted by him and his colleagues ‘seems pointless’. Murphy said that they did what they were asked to do and that no reason for the work had been given.

O’Neill selected the year 1992 and illustrated how the accountants had been told that the £34,835 lodged to the constituency No. 1 account had arisen from political fund-raising. However, during the same year, according to what the tribunal had been told, £19,000, which had been lodged to the
B
/
T
account, arose from political fund-raising and more particularly from the holding of a golf classic. Murphy agreed that, on the basis of what he was being told, the
B
/
T
account would have to be taken into consideration if a general picture for fund-raising for 1992 was to be constructed. He did not disagree when O’Neill said the document produced by
PWC
was ‘meaningless from the point of view of analysing the affairs of the constituency.’

Ahern’s evidence about the
B
/
T
account was given on 21 and 22 February 2008, and, as we have seen, it was given before the related documents had been handed over to the tribunal either by him or by his constituency organisation.

Deirdre McGrath, a senior manager with
PWC
, had been working on the audit of the accounts of Fianna Fáil head office and of the party leader since 2006. On 7 January 2008 she got a call from Cullagh in St Luke’s, who said Ahern wanted McGrath to update the income and expenditure statements on the No. 1 account for the years 2005 to date. McGrath agreed to go to St Luke’s at 9:30 on the following Monday morning, 14 January.

On the day McGrath got the call from Cullagh, Ahern’s solicitor, Liam Guidera, wrote to the tribunal on Ahern’s behalf describing the circumstances in which the Davy political donation of £5,000 had ended up in the
B
/
T
account, but he said the issue was more correctly a matter for the constituency organisation.

The day McGrath arrived at St Luke’s to begin her work on updating the No. 1 account was the day the tribunal sent a lengthy letter to Guidera seeking answers from Ahern about the
B
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account, the house committee and a range of matters relating to Ahern’s Drumcondra operation. It also notified Ahern that the tribunal was considering making orders of discovery in relation to these matters. When McGrath got to St Luke’s she and her colleague, Brian O’Gorman, were given cheque stubs and bank statements so that they could begin work on updating the No. 1 account.

On Monday 21 January 2008 Denis O’Connor, a senior partner with
PWC
, received a phone call from Seán Dorgan, the general secretary of Fianna Fáil. O’Connor was told the Taoiseach’s office would be contacting him regarding work Ahern wanted done on some accounts. Later in the week O’Connor got a call from Cullagh in St Luke’s, and it was arranged that O’Connor would meet Ahern there on Friday 25 January at 1 p.m.

Ahern told O’Connor that he wanted an income and expenditure statement, but not an audit, prepared on another constituency account. The account was the
B
/
T
account in the Irish Permanent in Drumcondra, though Ahern at all times referred to it as the ‘building trust’ account. The period to be covered was from the opening of the account in 1989 to date, though there had been no lodgements or withdrawals since 1996 other than the addition of interest. Ahern told O’Connor that the account was used primarily for the upkeep of St Luke’s and that the trustees on the account were Burke, Collins, Reilly, Brennan and Keane. Only the first two named were still alive.

Ahern gave O’Connor the bank statements on the account and said that he would be talking to people over the weekend and that he would see what information concerning the account he could get. It was agreed that they would meet again the following week, that O’Connor would bring McGrath with him and that she would also work on the account.

O’Connor was not told that the tribunal had contacted Ahern a month earlier asking him to answer certain questions and to produce documents concerning transactions on the account ‘as a matter of urgency’. The following week O’Connor was contacted by the Taoiseach’s office and asked to attend at St Luke’s at 3:30 on Thursday afternoon, New Year’s Eve. McGrath accompanied him. Ahern was there and had with him a notebook, in the middle pages of which he had some handwritten notes, which the accountants presumed concerned information he had gathered in the period since he had met O’Connor. Ahern had little with him by way of third-party documentary evidence, though he did point out that there was a copy of a cheque for £30,000 made out to a solicitor, Patrick O’Sullivan. Notes taken by O’Connor recorded Ahern saying that O’Sullivan acted for ‘the family of a staff member, Celia Larkin, whose three aunts were about to be moved out of their house. He was told the money was a loan and would be repaid with interest on the sale of the house after the death of the last occupants.’

The copy of the O’Sullivan cheque was the only third-party documentary evidence available concerning the account. Ahern said two lodgements, in 1992 (£19,000) and 1995 (£10,000), related to golf classics. A withdrawal of £20,000 on 26 August 1994 was cash to pay for work that was to be carried out on St Luke’s but which in the event was not carried out. A lodgement of the same amount on 26 October 1994 was the relodgement of the August withdrawal, the accountants were told.