Ansbacher Questions

Last week's Dail debate on the Tribunal of Inquiry Bill has done nothing to reassure the public that the role of the Central …

Last week's Dail debate on the Tribunal of Inquiry Bill has done nothing to reassure the public that the role of the Central Bank in relation to the Ansbacher accounts and its enforcement of exchange controls on behalf of the Government will be fully explored or explained. Attempts by the Opposition parties to ensure the newly-established Moriarty Tribunal would have the necessary powers to compel the Central Bank to disclose any required information were rejected by the Minister for Justice and Law Reform, Mr O'Donoghue. Only in exceptional cases such as criminal prosecutions could such information be demanded, he said; the tribunal did not qualify. In any event, there was no prima-facie evidence the law had been broken in relation to the Ansbacher accounts.

This is more of the obfuscation Government has practised where the £38 million Ansbacher accounts are concerned. First, the Coalition Government ensured their ownership and their legality could not be investigated by drafting terms of reference for the Moriarty Tribunal which limited investigation to payments made to politicians from the funds. Now the Central Bank Act may inhibit an in-depth investigation into how the operations of individual licensed banks were regulated, unless those bodies voluntarily agreed to such disclosures.

Last month, a letter from the Governor of the Central Bank, Mr Maurice O'Connell, responded to concern expressed by the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, that the bank may have failed in its supervisory functions in relation to Guinness & Mahon (G&M) bank and the Ansbacher accounts. The facts outlined by Mr O'Connell made dismal reading. For a period of 13 years, from 1979 to 1992, the Central Bank was employed as the agent of the Minister to oversee Government exchange controls in the banking sector and to supervise them generally. During all that time, when dubious offshore deposits by Irish citizens in the Ansbacher accounts alone amounted to £38 million, officers of the Central Bank reported that "exchange control issues did not arise from banking supervision." The Governor dealt publicly, for the first time, with the affairs of G&M and the Ansbacher accounts. "There is no record in the bank", he states, that it was informed of an internal audit by G&M in 1989, which expressed concern over the method of operation of the Ansbacher accounts. "There is no record", he continues, that the bank had discovered the system for operating the Ansbacher accounts, during its inspections and review meetings. From this, a conclusion is drawn that the Central Bank had no knowledge of the role played by G&M in the organisation and management of the Ansbacher deposits, or of the deposits themselves, prior to the publication of the McCracken report. On the basis of this record, it is past time that a greater degree of transparency and responsibility was required by Government of this important State agency.