Widow paid debt opened for benefit of Haughey

The widow of Mr P.V. Doyle was asked to pay £150,230 to clear a debt incurred by her husband for the benefit of Mr Charles Haughey after it had already been cancelled, the tribunal heard yesterday.

The late Mr Des Traynor, Mr Haughey's personal financial adviser, told executives of the Doyle hotel group in March 1988, shortly after Mr Doyle had died, that the sum was outstanding on a loan account which had been opened by the hotelier for the former Taoiseach's benefit.

Mr George Carville, a former deputy managing director of Doyles, said Mr Traynor told them Mr Haughey had been due to repay the debt but "there wasn't a hope in hell" of this happening.

Mr Carville remarked: "We trusted Des Traynor very, very much and and if Des said it was £150,000 we would have accepted his word."

While the group would normally have looked for a discount or negotiated such a debt, he said there was no question of doing so on this occasion as "Mr Doyle had only been four or five weeks dead, and a lot of people were in a state of shock including Mrs Doyle and it wasn't the time to start haggling."

The company executives advised Mrs Margaret Doyle to close the account and this she did by writing a cheque for the sum in question. It was dated March 23rd, 1988, and forwarded to Guinness & Mahon bank, where the loan had been taken out.

Mr Carville said he was not aware the debt had been fully repaid the previous month and that there was no money nominally due in Mr Doyle's name when he spoke to Mr Traynor.

He became aware of this fact only after seeing documents from the bank showing the debt was cleared on February 26th, 1988, with a transfer of £126,312 from an account in the name of Amiens Securities, a company controlled by Mr Traynor.

Mr Carville said Mr Traynor had acted as an adviser to the Doyle group in an unofficial capacity for a number of years before becoming a director after Mr Doyle died, on February 6th, 1988. "He was a personal adviser . . . like, if we had a problem, Mr Doyle would say `ring Des'. He just made any problem disappear, he was so simple with his solutions."

Mr Traynor contacted Mr Carville in March 1988 to discuss the debt. They met in the Berkeley Court hotel with company executives Mr William Corrigan and Mr David Doyle. According to Mr Carville, Mr Traynor said the loan account had been opened to "facilitate Mr Haughey who was apparently financially embarrassed at the time".

Mr Traynor said the interest and capital was to have been re paid by Mr Haughey and that some repayments had been made but these had stopped.

Mr Carville noted that Mr Tray nor never mentioned a second loan taken out by Mr Doyle for Mr Haughey's benefit. He added he had only a vague recollection of Mr Doyle saying he had guaranteed a loan for Mr Haughey "but that I need not worry as Mr Haughey had agreed to pay the interest and refund the capital".