Director jailed in tax fraud was highly regarded

The latest person to fall foul of the Revenue Commissioners' new prosecution policy seemed an unlikely candidate for a jail sentence. Patrick O'Doherty (42), a company director, from a Co Limerick village, is a single man who lived with his ill mother.

The son of a national school principal, he was described by Judge Sean O'Leary in Limerick Circuit Court as a man who had served his community well and was highly regarded. He pleaded guilty to the tax fraud charges.

But before sentencing O'Doherty to two years in jail, Judge O'Leary heard he had a previous conviction from 1992 on two charges of false pretences and had been fined u£2,500. In his latest court conviction, he had attempted to defraud the Revenue of a substantial amount of money, the judge said.

O'Doherty, who has a BA in German and English from Maynooth and a postgraduate diploma in business studies from the University of Limerick, said he set up a company which dealt with language translation over the Internet.

In a throwback to his Maynooth background and, betraying a wry sense of humour, he named the company Babel International Language Services, after the biblical city of Babel whose inhabitants were cursed by God to speak in different languages after they attempted to construct a tower to reach heaven. The project ground to a halt in the ensuing confusion.

O'Doherty's company, whose only other listed director is his mother, fared little better. The court heard this week that it had not traded successfully and was dissolved last January. A senior Revenue inspector said there was no evidence of any business having been carried out, although this was disputed by O'Doherty's counsel.

However, O'Doherty had made incorrect VAT returns, based on false invoices, some of which had been acquired illegally from another company, and obtained money by false pretences between 1995 and 1996 amounting to u £34,118, although he was also charged with attempting to obtain by false pretences a further £32,760.

The court was also told the death of O'Doherty's father in 1992 appeared to have had a traumatic effect on him and he received psychiatric treatment.

O'Doherty was highly regarded by some people in Ballingarry, which has a population of 400. Little else distinguishes it from hundreds of other villages, except that it has a good restaurant, The Mustard Seed, listed in the Blue Book guide.

Most of O'Doherty's generation would have emigrated. He was the only one of his family of a sister and brothers to remain at home. He drank socially and was widely known after being elected a member of the community council for a three-year term.

One neighbour said that as the best educated member of the council, he cut a controversial figure. "He would come up with ideas and they would be against them," he said. But he gained a certain notoriety in his part of the county when he took West Limerick Resources to the High Court, apparently out of principle, after he was ratified as a director but the meeting had to be reconvened because a member association had not received proper notice.

The High Court decision went against him, as did the Supreme Court ruling, but the voluntary organisation was left with an outstanding bill of about £20,000 because of his unemployed status. As a man of principle, he might appreciate the justice in being jailed this week on tax fraud charges.