THE HISTORY: Colm Keena on the events which led to the discovery of the scheme
When the late Mr Des Traynor, the main architect of the Ansbacher Deposits, asked Mr Ben Dunne for money for the then Taoiseach, Mr Charles Haughey, some time in 1987, he planted the seed for the discovery of the secretive financial service he had been operating for two decades.
Mr Traynor made his request through Mr Noel Fox, a Haughey supporter and financial adviser to Mr Dunne and Dunnes Stores. Mr Traynor told Mr Fox he was trying to put together a group of six or so people who would contribute £150,000 each to the Taoiseach.
The matter was one which needed to remain highly confidential. When told about the approach Mr Dunne commented to Mr Fox: "I think Haughey is making a huge mistake trying to get six or seven people together Christ picked 12 apostles and one of them crucified him." Mr Dunne said he would give Mr Haughey all the money Mr Traynor was seeking to collect.
In November, 1987, Mr Traynor sought an initial payment of £205,000 which, he said, was needed urgently. He said the cheque should be made out to John Furze, a name that meant nothing to Mr Fox or Mr Dunne. The late Mr Furze was a Cayman banker and senior executive in Ansbacher Cayman.
The cheque was drawn down on Mr Dunne's instruction and passed by Mr Fox to Mr Traynor. He sent it to Guinness Mahon & Co, London, and asked that it be put in the account of Guinness Mahon Cayman Trust (as Ansbacher was then called). Once cleared, the money was transferred to a Guinness Mahon Cayman Trust account in Guinness & Mahon (G&M) in Dublin.
The money was soon spent by Mr Haughey. Some of it was used to settle a £105,000 loan Mr Haughey had with the Agricultural Credit Corporation. More was used to feed the bill-paying service operated by Haughey Boland for Mr Haughey. On one day, December 22nd, 1987, £59,000 was withdrawn from G&M in cash.
Over the coming three to four years a number of other payments followed a similar route. Mr Haughey resigned in 1992 and settled into what seemed a quiet retirement. However, clouds were gathering in the form of a dispute within the Dunne family.
Following his being removed from his senior executive positions within the Dunne group in 1993, Mr Dunne initiated proceedings against his siblings and the Dunnes Settlement Trust. As part of his claim that the Dunnes trust was a sham, Mr Dunne claimed that he had given trust money to Mr Haughey.
The proceedings were eventually settled, with Mr Dunne reportedly receiving £125 million. However, the secret of the payments to Mr Haughey was now known to a number of people. Mr Haughey knew this, and he was worried.
In 1996, it emerged in the Irish Independent that Mr Dunne had authorised payments relating to work on the home of the then government minister and chairman of Fine Gael, Mr Michael Lowry. Soon afterwards it was reported in The Irish Times that Mr Haughey had been given more than £1 million by Mr Dunne. A tribunal, the McCracken (Dunnes Payments) Tribunal, was established to look into these matters. The lawyers, working in private session, began to follow the money trail.
A problem which quickly emerged was that the payments being investigated ended up in the Dublin account of a Cayman bank, Ansbacher Ltd. Cayman banks are covered by strict secrecy laws governing the disclosure of information. An approach by the tribunal to the Cayman courts, seeking a direction to the Cayman bank that it co-operate with the tribunal, failed.
However, when seeking discovery of documents from Guinness Mahon & Co Ltd in London, the tribunal got a copy of an internal audit report which had been carried out on the Dublin bank in 1989 and which outlined how the Ansbacher bank's deposits in Dublin were managed. The document identied "DPC" as the person who operated a secret ledger accounting system on the G&M computer which related to the Ansbacher accounts. The tribunal quickly found out that DPC was Mr Pádraig Collery.
The tribunal questioned both Mr Collery and Mr Traynor's secretary, Ms Joan Williams, about the Ansbacher Deposits and their roles. Both argued that they were merely carrying out clerk type functions, at the behest of Mr Traynor, and did not know the background to what was going on.
Despite this reticence, however, the tribunal did get access to some of the details kept by Mr Traynor and his assistants concerning who owned what within the Ansbacher Deposits. It also learned that much of this material had been transferred from the CRH offices on Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin, to the offices of Mr Traynor's associate, Mr Sam Field Corbett, following Mr Traynor's death in 1994. The basic outline of the Ansbacher Deposits was now known, as was where people should go if they wanted to find out more.
A key breakthrough was made while the tribunal lawyers were trawling through documents linked to the Ansbacher accounts in Guinness & Mahon and IIB Bank. Some Ansbacher accounts had codes attached to their names and while looking at documents linked to withdrawals from these accounts the lawyers spotted a note written by Ms Williams. "By hand to CJH". It was the only reference on the files which mentioned Haughey. The withdrawal at issue was a draft and when the lawyers followed the draft they found it had ended up in an account in ACC Bank in the name of Charles Haughey.
A large amount of the Ansbacher money lodged with Guinness & Mahon and IIB Bank was kept in general or pooled accounts. However, other, smaller accounts in the Cayman bank's name also existed, and these often had codes attached. The tribunal decided that Mr Haughey's accounts were ones coded S8 and S9 (it was from one of these that the ACC Bank money was withdrawn).
Other coded accounts belonged to other depositors. A key element of the whole scheme had now been discovered and someone, somewhere, had to know the names which lay behind the codes.
On June 30th, 1997, the McCracken Tribunal announced in public session that it had discovered what it called the Ansbacher Deposits, a scheme involving supposed offshore deposits which were lodged here and which were accessible to the depositors. The people who had money in the deposits had seen where the tribunal's work was leading, and the bulk of the money in the deposits had already been withdrawn.
In his report Mr Justice McCracken pointed out that it was not the function of his tribunal to examine these deposits in any detail.
He continued: "It may well be that a number of the Irish depositors may have been people engaged in international business which was greatly facilitated by having a sterling account abroad which did not require exchange control permission to operate. No doubt there were others who deposited the monies in this way for other motives."