Time for Paddy Teahon to take the plunge?

BUSINESS OPINION: As the waves generated by the national aquatic centre controversy swell, the position of Paddy Teahon at the helm of Campus & Stadium Ireland Development (CSID) looks less and less tenable.

The former top civil servant has already offered to stake his reputation on the project being delivered at a cost to the Exchequer of £350 million (€444 million), but this has not yet been put to the test.

He may now unwittingly have risked his reputation again as a result of the way the contract to build the national aquatic centre was awarded. Leaving aside the fraught issue of whether CSID knew the real identity of some of those involved, lets look at Mr Teahon's failure to tell the Government that a dormant or shelf company was playing a central role in the winning consortium.

As any lawyer will tell you, shelf companies are a common, if not necessary, feature of complex bids involving different interests and various contingencies.

It should be remembered that Valentia Telecommunications started life as a shelf company around which the bid by Sir Anthony O'Reilly and others for Eircom was built. Nobody is remotely concerned - and nor should they be - that the State's telecommunication infrastructure was sold to a shelf company with no previous trading record.

The problem is that shelf companies take on a very different complexion in the political domain. In these post-Ansbacher days they are viewed with suspicion and when they turn out to be owned by off-shore entities the alarm bells really start ringing.

The difficulty that Mr Teahon faces is not that he - as chairman and chief executive of CSID - allowed a State body under his care to enter into an agreement with such an entity, because I suspect such things happen quite regularly and quite properly.

In fact it would be surprising if the various unsuccessful rival bids were put together without some sort of recourse to this fairly normal corporate vehicle.

Mr Teahon's problem is that given his former position as the Secretary General of the Department of the Taoiseach he should have had the political nous to head off the potential political problem inherent in dealing with a dormant shelf company.

If, when The Irish Times contacted her department last week, the Tánaiste had replied she was aware of the structure of the deal and was satisfied as to its bona fides, the matter probably would have ended there and then. Instead two Government ministers were caught on the hop and sent spinning into a frenzy of holding statements and demands for explanations about the involvement of shelf companies.

In Mr Teahon's defence you can argue that he cannot micro-manage every aspect of the project. This is true, but Mr Teahon is seen as the ultimate safe pair of hands and preventing the sort of embarrassing fiasco that we saw last week is one of the reasons that the former top civil servant was asked to take on this particular job.

Given the incredible political sensitivity that surrounds the issue, he could have been expected to be on his guard for landmines like the one that exploded under the Taoiseach's pet project last week.

The farce into which the national aquatic centre is now in danger of descending could not have come at a worse time for Mr Teahon. The same goes for Ms Laura Magahy whose company - Magahy and Co - provides executive services to CSID.

A report commissioned by the Government last year and which was published at the end of January was very critical of the way the project has been run to date.

High-Point Rendel carried out an "independent overview" of the project and found CSID's in-house team lacking in various key areas. They recommended it be strengthened to create a team "with experience of projects of this size, complexity and challenge".

It also criticised the lack of a business model setting out the range and specification of the facilities, who would use them and on what basis; the capital budget, costs and income; the operational performance, including sinking fund; the risks the Government would accept and how the facility should be managed and operated. High-Point Rendel said that there were indicative answers to most of these questions but also inconsistencies and contradictions.

It was a far from flattering comment on Mr Teahon's tenure at the top of the project. His response was to stake his considerable personal credibility on delivering the project on time and on budget, if he was given the go ahead by the Government.

One contributory factor to the bind that Mr Teahon finds himself in, may be that he has spread himself a little too thinly.

In addition to his task at CSID he is also fulfilling a similarly demanding function at the body set up to develop a digital media district in the Dublin Liberties. Ms Magahy and her team are also involved in this project.

In addition the former civil servant has his own private consultancy and recently joined the board of Treasury Holdings, one of the largest privately owned property groups in the Republic.

It will be instructive to see how Mr Teahon's situation plays out in comparison to events at AIB, where the chief executive, Mr Michael Buckley, is also under pressure because of management failure within his organisation.

His fate will hinge on the contents of the report compiled by Mr Eugene Ludwig into the circumstances of a $691 million (€788 million) fraud at AIB's Allfirst subsidiary in the US. The report is currently in the hands of AIB chairman Mr Lochlann Quinn who has given him strong backing to date.

It would be hard to see Mr Buckley surviving a report as critical as the High-Point Rendel overview of CSID.

The same holds if the detail of the fraud turns out to be as embarrassing to his chairman as the events surrounding the national aquatic centre have been to the Tánaiste, the Minister for Sport and the Taoiseach.

But business works in a different way to politics and those in business should be grateful.