The chief executive of the Irish Stock Exchange (ISE) has rejected suggestions that it did not act appropriately in relation to the DCC/Fyffes insider-dealing case.
Tom Healy insisted he had never offered to "vet" documents from DCC in a way that might help the company to undermine a Garda investigation into insider dealing.
Mr Healy said it was not the case that he had at one stage suggested to DCC that he or the exchange would "vet" expert reports prepared for industrial holdings group DCC, and only forward them to the Director of Public Prosecutions if he felt they would help DCC's attempts to undermine a Garda investigation then under way into the insider-dealing allegation.
The case involved DCC's sale in February 2000 of shares in Fyffes worth €106 million. Six weeks later Fyffes issued a profit warning and its share price fell by 25 per cent. The stock exchange conducted an inquiry and forwarded a report to the DPP.
The Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation began a criminal inquiry and Fyffes initiated a civil action. A High Court ruling in the civil case in December found no insider dealing had occurred. The criminal inquiry is likely to be wound up.
Internal DCC memos that suggested a proposal to "vet" documents might have been made were disclosed during a Supreme Court hearing last year. Mr Healy said yesterday he did not wish to "get into a barney" with the DCC executives and advisers who wrote the memos, but he did not make any such proposal. "I'm fairly confident I didn't go down that road. We regarded ourselves as having a duty to pass on anything to the DPP," he said, in an interview with The Irish Times. He said he was happy with the way the stock exchange had conducted itself in the mammoth insider-dealing case but had been restrained from speaking out, until now, for legal reasons.
He said he had told DCC that it would be helpful if expert reports it had commissioned and which supported its case were forwarded to the DPP. However, he had not disclosed how these reports would influence the attitude of the exchange towards the case. He said that to do so would have been a criminal offence.
In his ruling in a related case in the Supreme Court, Mr Justice Brian McCracken said "there may have been some suggestion, oddly enough emanating from the stock exchange rather than from DCC, that there should be some form of vetting process ... At the end of the day, this was not the basis on which the documents were furnished" by DCC to the exchange.
Disclosure of the memos in the Supreme Court case led to questions being asked about the appropriateness of the exchange acting as regulator of the market.
A DCC memo stated: "Given the personalities and vested interests involved, it seems likely [ DCC] might make greater progress with the [ ISE] board than with the executive."
Another memo written by DCC chief executive Jim Flavin recorded the content of a conversation he had with Brian Davy, deputy chairman of the stock exchange and chairman of Davy stockbrokers, brokers to both DCC and Fyffes.
Mr Flavin was the person who had the allegedly "insider" information. The memo recorded Mr Davy as having conveyed the content of a conversation he'd had with Mr Healy, concerning the DCC case, to Mr Flavin.
Mr Healy told The Irish Times yesterday that Mr Davy had been acting as an adviser to DCC at the time, and not as a director of the ISE board, and that this had been clear to him at the time. "Our board had no role in this matter. The board was told nothing about it."
Mr Healy said it was correct that at one stage he had expressed the view that he would be "happy to see the whole issue go away".
The comment was recorded in a memo of a meeting in October 2002, between him and two DCC advisers.
"I did say that I wanted to see the thing finalised." However, he meant by this that he would like to see the DPP make a decision "one way or the other".