A senior tax official took grave exception to remarks made by the former chief executive of AIB, Mr Gerry Scanlan, at yesterday's DIRT inquiry, which he felt suggested that a deal agreed between the bank and the Revenue Commissioners had been hammered out at a football match.
"I reject this scurrilous attempt to damage my good name," Mr Tony Mac Carthaigh, chief inspector of taxes, told the Public Accounts Committee in response to Mr Scanlan's earlier submission that Mr Pat O'Mahony, a former chief executive of the bank, might have met Mr Mac Carthaigh at a GAA match.
"The deal was done in Croke Park, then?" Mr Rabbitte had asked the AIB chief. "I would say that Cork were playing, anyway," replied Mr Scanlan.
"So you think this deal was done at a GAA match in Cork?"
"No, I did not say that, deputy," replied Mr Scanlan.
At the end of the bank chief's testimony, Mr Mac Carthaigh sought leave to put the record straight. The only match he had attended in Cork was the All-Ireland replay in 1983: "While I had great vision on what was going on in AIB, I don't believe I have eight years' advance notice."
He had been invited to visit the AIB bank centre, courtesy of Mr Pat O'Mahony, with whom he had been at school in Bandon in the 1960s. He had met him about 10 times in 35 years, he explained.
The visit to the bank centre he described as "an education". The AIB group taxation head, Mr James O'Mahony, joined them for a meal: "At the dessert he raised the matter of my visit to Galway. I rounded on him very strongly and told him I didn't mix business and pleasure. I want to put it clearly on the record that this is not the way I operate and I absolutely reject the scurrilous attempt to damage my good name in the way it has been done."
Mr Scanlan totally withdrew his remarks, and the chairman, Mr Jim Mitchell, said that his apology had been accepted.
Earlier, Mr Rabbitte had questioned the former chief executive closely concerning the £100 million potential liability for DIRT and asked if he could explain where the figure had come from.
"I have long since concluded that that £100 million is total fiction," he said. All the evidence suggested there was no basis for it. "The only way it could have been done was to go into the branches and examine each single deposit."
"There isn't to this day a single piece of paper other than Mr Spollen's and Mr [James] O'Mahony's original piece of paper that attempts a scientific calculation?" Mr Rabbitte asked.
"That to my mind is evidence that the bank believed it had a deal with the Revenue and there was no need to even try and do it," Mr Scanlan said.
He was not party to the negotiations with the Revenue people, but had heard about them from the chairman, Mr Sutherland.
"And did the chairman intervene on behalf of Mr Spollen?" Mr Rabbitte asked.
"He told me of his concern about Mr Spollen's possibility of taking an action against the bank for wrongful dismissal." He had faced down this situation, he said: "As chief executive, if my writ didn't run throughout the bank organisation, I'd no business there."
Mr Rabbitte said he felt it was extraordinary that the bank's chief executive was not involved in discussions "to put the thing right", having described the problem to the committee earlier as "deep-seated and intractable".
"I wouldn't be wasting my time dealing with areas where I had competent management to deal with them and to whom responsibility had been delegated," Mr Scanlan responded. "They had to earn their keep. I wasn't going to do their work for them."