Caveat: Varadkar’s ‘FBI for white-collar crime’ is all talk unless it has money

This week David Drumm, former chief executive of Anglo Irish Bank, was held to account for his criminality during the banking crisis. It only took the State 10 years.

Last week a new law passed all stages of the Oireachtas comprising a package of anti-corruption and bribery measures addressing the recommendations of the final report of the Mahon tribunal. That only took a mere six years. Progress, right?

In April Leo Varadkar promised in the Dáil that the Government would "strengthen, expand and beef up the role of the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement" to make it a "a sort of Irish FBI, if one likes, when it comes to white-collar crime".

If it took the State a decade to bring a single bank chief executive to justice, and six years to implement some of the recommendations from the most eye-popping anti-corruption tribunal in Irish history, just how long will it take Varadkar to turn the ODCE's Ian Drennan into a G-Man? A year? A decade? Will he ever?

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If Varadkar is truly serious, and not simply grandstanding, it should take him only four months. The budget is in October. Open the purse strings, give the ODCE a proper budget to pay for a multitude of investigations, and, most importantly, encourage it to spend the lot. Otherwise his "FBI for white-collar crime" talk is empty jaw-jaw.

The Government’s big idea, first mooted last November and colourfully expanded upon by Varadkar with his FBI remarks in April, is to take the ODCE out of the government department in which it resides and make it an independent agency.

Bureau of investigation

“It will be moved from being an office within the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation to a stand-alone bureau of investigation,” the Taoiseach told the Dáil.

At the November announcement officials said this would give it the “the ability to recruit and enlist expert staff”. Presumably this means it would be allowed to spend its money without bureaucratic bean-counters from the Civil Service sticking their oars in.

There is no doubt that that ODCE is badly stretched. It has only about 34 staff, as well as seven gardaí seconded to the office. That’s barely 40 people to investigate all white-collar crime in the State.

Forty? There will be more law enforcement officials than that around Jones’s Road on Sunday for the Dubs versus Longford. If the consequences for justice and the public interest weren’t so egregious, it would be funny.

Last May the ODCE's very existence was being called into question after the trial of Drumm's boardroom colleague, former Anglo chairman Sean Fitzpatrick, collapsed after it emerged the regulator botched aspects of its investigation.

We now know from papers filed as part of its investigation into Independent News & Media (INM) that, a few weeks after that trial collapsed, the ODCE's shot at redemption walked through its front door. It was Robert Pitt, INM's former chief executive.

Do-or-die

He told the ODCE everything he knew about a data breach at the company that compromised journalists' sources, and was allegedly orchestrated by its chairman Leslie Buckley, who was a board nominee of Denis O'Brien. The ODCE has since thrown itself into the INM investigation, perhaps sensing that this is do-or-die for the office's reputation.

Yet sometimes it doesn’t help itself. The ODCE’s 2017 annual report is due to be released shortly. The 2016 report from last summer revealed that it received a budget allocation of €5 million. Yet Drennan returned about €2.2 million of that unspent to the Government. Over the previous three years the amount returned was close to €6 million.

It was suggested by the ODCE that the underspend was required to cover it for potential legal costs. Yet there won’t be any legal cases to provide cover for unless the ODCE spends every last penny it can find on investigative work.

Imagine how much outside help, such as forensic accountants and private investigators, Drennan could have hired for €6 million. From his cold, dead hands the Government should have been forced to prise that cash.

The notion that the ODCE is a malnourished child doesn’t help it when it comes to examining the affairs of some of the most powerful people around. In the midst of the INM investigation, O’Brien (net worth €5 billion or the ODCE’s budget for a millennium) wrote to Drennan threatening to hold him personally responsible for damage allegedly caused by details of the investigation entering the public domain.

Extraordinary missive

The letter was read out in open court. It was a most extraordinary missive for a private individual to send to a State anti-corruption official. If Ireland was the US, and the ODCE was the real-life FBI, could you imagine any businessman sending a similar letter to the head of the crime agency? They wouldn’t dare.

The proper investigation of white-collar crime in this State is a bad joke. Just this week the Central Bank, the regulator responsible for investigating potential market abuse, went to the High Court to get formal access to documents it wants from the ODCE’s INM investigation.

Why was the State shelling out for two different sets of lawyers to discuss this in front of a judge? The Central Bank should have had the documents emailed to it five minutes after they were written by the ODCE.

Critics of the State strategy on white collar crime are blue in the face compolaining. It isn't just independence the ODCE needs, it is resources. Varadkar must pony up or shut up.

FOOTNOTES

Drunk drink? Surely not!
John Teeling, the elder statesman of the Irish whiskey industry, warned this week that there would soon be a shortage of the brown stuff for export. He says that the whiskey being made now won't be sold for seven years.

In the meantime, as the industry’s sales grow at 10 per cent annually, it could run out. Perish the thought. It’s like 3am at a booming house party and all the drink is drunk. Panic sets in.

New distilleries are popping up all over the place, from Powerscourt in Wicklow, to Slane Castle, to Dublin’s Liberties district. Production is being ramped up across the industry, principally for export. The Irish can only drink so much. But what if, instead of a shortage of whiskey, we soon have a surfeit of the stuff?

Bourbon is being targeted on the list of retaliatory taxes drawn up by European and Canadian officials after Donald Trump slapped an import tax on foreign steel. What if a Trump counter-retaliation includes European spirits, cutting off an export route for the Irish whiskey renaissance?

So far there is no sense that Irish whiskey is about to get dragged into a global trade war. But with Trump in office who knows what could happen. Predicting his policy decisions is a fool’s errand.

It’s always the way with whiskey, though – you never know when you have enough of the stuff.

Athenry fiasco
It is all very well for the Government to draft a new plan this week to attract data centres to regions outside Dublin. But how on earth will it explain the Apple/Athenry fiasco when it is hitting up potential investors?

The Government argues that it intends to streamline the planning process to prevent such disasters from happening again. But the planning process wasn't the problem. It was the court process. Apple pulled out of Athenry after over a year and a half of judicial review applications challenging the final decision of the planning authorities.

How can any Government tackle objectors’ rights to access the courts without falling foul of the Constitution?