Public Affairs: Those who use accountants and offshore banks to rob the community rarely get to rub shoulders in Mountjoy with common or garden thieves. Robbing the taxman is not listed alongside other thefts and larcenies in the Garda Report but in the quaintly titled "non- headline offences" chapter. Eithne Fitzgerald reviews Colm Keena's The Ansbacher Conspiracy.
However, the secretive Ansbacher tax scam hit the headlines when the tortuous money trail linking Charles Haughey to donations from Ben Dunne was uncovered by the McCracken Tribunal. The initials CJH on one of thousands of documents submitted to the Tribunal was the key which opened the door to millions squirrelled away offshore by the rich and powerful, away from the prying eyes of the Revenue Commissioners.
Some of those who hid their money in the Cayman Islands had been appointed to State boards to serve the public interest. The names listed included former directors of Aer Lingus and Bord Fáilte, the author of the Culliton report on industrial policy, the architect of the Central Bank and a former director of the Central Bank.
They included many of the leading Cork merchant princes, and virtually all the directors of Ireland's leading industrial company, Cement Roadstone. Leading property developer John Byrne, so fortunate in letting the offices he built to Government departments, was an Ansbacher name. So too was fellow Kerryman Denis Foley TD, whose political career was ended by his outing as an Ansbacher account holder. The Doyle hotel dynasty and the Purcell meat empire also featured on the list.
The late Des Traynor, Haughey's bagman, was at the heart of the spider's web. From his days with Haughey Boland, to the board of Guinness Mahon, to chairman of Cement Roadstone Holdings (CRH), Traynor was regarded by many as a financial genius whom they would trust with their money and ask no questions.
Colm Keena's book offers a readable account of the people, the politics and the complex financial transactions which lay behind the Ansbacher scheme.
Trust funds were set up in the offshore bank, Guinness Mahon Cayman Trust (subsequently renamed Ansbacher Cayman) on behalf of tax-shy investors. Then these funds were lodged back in Dublin in the name of the Cayman bank. With no open records to link them to their owners, the Dublin funds were well hidden from Revenue in Dublin Castle. A parallel set of secret accounts, the memorandum accounts, tracked who owned what, with codes used to protect identities. When people wanted to withdraw their money, it was made to look like a loan from the Cayman bank's Dublin account, and in a final irony, tax relief could be claimed on the interest. Special headed notepaper was kept to print off bank statements, but before Traynor issued them, in a bizarre touch, the heading was cut off the statements.
The Central Bank came close to uncovering the whole plot as far back as 1976 and continued to express concern about the Guinness Mahon books right up to 1984. Des Traynor lied about the hole in the Guinness Mahon accounts and the nature of its offshore business. The Central Bank, with fresh memories of the collapse of Irish Trust Bank in 1976 and Merchant Banking in 1982, backed off, reluctant to push things too far.
Every bank story needs a prickly-named character. Allfirst had Frank Bramble. The Ansbacher accounts had John Furze. Furze kept the secret Cayman island records, while back in Guinness Mahon in Dublin, it was Pádraig Collery who kept the secret books.
When Des Traynor and Guinness Mahon parted company, the offshore bank moved with Traynor to Cement Roadstone headquarters in Fitzwilliam Square. Here the operation became even more like something in a Le Carré novel. Pádraig Collery, who had no link to Cement Roadstone, had a key to its offices, where he worked on Saturdays on the computer records of the secret accounts. Traynor lunched regularly in the Berkeley Court or Jury's, where hotelier David Doyle occasionally slipped him an envelope of money for lodgment offshore. Traynor's offices were like a dead-letter drop, with people leaving cash.
Traynor's secretary continued to send out headless bank statements, or Traynor would simply show a client a piece of paper purporting to be his account balance. Top business people entrusted hundreds of thousands to a banking operation with no front office, no paperwork to speak of, and a hole-in-corner way of doing business.
The whole edifice could have collapsed when Traynor died suddenly in 1994, but steps were taken to prevent exposure. The Saturday after Traynor's funeral, Cayman Islands banker John Furze and Pádraic Collery went into Traynor's office in Cement Roadstone, and took away two filing cabinets and the computer with the secret records.
Some documents Furze took to Grand Cayman, others he destroyed. The Irish Times later described these events as "four shreddings and a funeral".
Secrecy was the hallmark of the Ansbacher operation. Keena argues that today's link between money and politics is more open, more brazen. The halving of capital tax rates and the last-minute tax breaks put into the Finance Bill still look after the rich and powerful, but in full public view.
This is an intriguing story of greed, offshore banking and the murky intersection of money and politics. And in this world of white-collar crime, no one has yet gone to jail.
Eithne Fitzgerald is a former minister of state and is now economic policy analyst with the thinktank, tasc
The Ansbacher Conspiracy. By Colm Keena, Gill and Macmillan, 202pp, €12.99