FORMER TAOISEACH Bertie Ahern told the Mahon tribunal yesterday that he never had a foreign bank account which could explain the sterling lodgements to his accounts.
Tribunal counsel Des O'Neill SC said he was asking if Mr Ahern could have forgotten having such an account because of the foreign exchange transactions that the tribunal has discovered and which hadn't been disclosed by Mr Ahern.
"I never had a foreign account," Mr Ahern said. "Not in any form. Not from a bank account, a post office account, a currency exchange account or any other account.
"If I had been trying to deceive or being deceitful I could have had that," he said. "I could have had it in bogus names, I could have done all kinds of things. What I just did was, get my salary cheques, all of my life," and lodge them into his accounts.
He said that other than during his separation from his wife, he had lodged his salary to his accounts. "I was out working, out doing my job as a political leader of this country, working my butt off.
"Not trying to make other than my own income and the few sums of money that I got from others. And then I end up with all of this.
"That's the story of my life," he added. Mr O'Neill said that of the 86 lodgements to Mr Ahern's accounts during 1993 to 1995 that have been examined by the tribunal, there was no evidence to show the source of "99.99 per cent" of the money.
There was no evidence to show any of the lodgements being the direct result of one of Mr Ahern's salary cheques being lodged, Mr O'Neill said. Mr Ahern said he "didn't start lodging the salary cheques until maybe 1997" but that the vast bulk of his income arose from his salary.
Mr Ahern has said his cheques were cashed and some of the money lodged, or a number of cheques could be lodged at the same time.
Mr O'Neill said Mr Ahern's new evidence that he had accumulated approximately £15,500 in sterling cash in the early years of the 1990s, and that this explained sterling lodgements to his accounts in 1994, was the latest in an ongoing process whereby sterling lodgements were being discovered.
Mr Ahern said that over the period 1990 to 1993 he was considering buying a two-bedroom mews in Salford Quay, Manchester, and this caused him to change amounts of £2,000 to £3,000 at a time into sterling on five or six occasions so as to build up a sterling deposit.
He said he exchanged the currencies with the successful Manchester-based Irish businessman, the late Tim Kilroe. He said they would exchange the currencies in bars, or cars, or restaurants, or in Mr Kilroe's hotel during Mr Ahern's weekend trips to Manchester.
Mr Ahern said he exchanged the money with Mr Kilroe to show him he was still "interested" in buying the property, which was not being developed by Mr Kilroe. Mr Ahern said he would bring the sterling back to Ireland and put it in his safe. He said he didn't open a bank account in the UK because he was "outside the banking system" at the time. Mr Ahern returns to the witness box today.