On the trail of receipts in the Ray Burke saga

There is much, much more to the story of the Fitzwilton transfer to Ray Burke of the £30,000 cheque made payable to cash in June 1989. And there are two leads to the story, which no doubt will be followed by the planning tribunal, chaired by Mr Justice Flood.

The first is the trail of the receipt. Precisely how was the payment of the £30,000 acknowledged by Fianna Fail and/or by Ray Burke? And the second trail to be followed is how the payment was accounted for in the accounts of Fitzwilton plc.

The receipt issue is very curious indeed.

If, as Fitzwilton claims, no receipt was obtained from Fianna Fail, did this not give rise to problems in accounting for the payment in the accounts? It gives rise to the question as to why Fitzwilton did not pursue Fianna Fail for a receipt for the full £30,000 payment. Even if Fianna Fail did send a receipt for £10,000 to Rennicks Manufacturing Ltd, the Fitzwilton subsidiary through which the payment was made, which Fitzwilton denies, would that not have prompted them to ask for a receipt for the full amount?

Fitzwilton has said that Rennicks Manufacturing Ltd, its subsidiary company through which the payment was made, was reimbursed by intercompany transfers from Fitzwilton at the end of June 1989. It has also said "the payment was recorded in the accounts of the company (Fitzwilton) in the appropriate manner".

It would be interesting to know the details of the reimbursement and the specific manner in which the payment was treated in the company accounts, given that there was no receipt from Fianna Fail to either Fitzwilton itself or to Rennicks Manufacturing Ltd for the £30,000 payment.

So far Fitzwilton has been slow in answering questions for the media about this, but there is reason to believe that it will be more forthcoming on these and related matters in the near future. Fitzwilton has assembled a formidable legal team, and one assumes that part of its task is to handle questions such as these, at least for the planning tribunal.

Courtesy of Geraldine Kennedy in The Irish Times last Saturday, we now know a little more than we knew previously about the background to the Fitzwilton £30,000 payment to Fianna Fail via Ray Burke in June 1989.

She revealed that never previously did a company associated with Mr Tony O'Reilly make a donation to a political party in the manner that Fitzwilton did in June 1989. But more interestingly, she confirmed that the Fianna Fail party headquarters was fully aware of the £30,000 payment to Mr Burke at the time. So well aware was it of the payment that it made representations to Mr Burke about getting all or some of the £30,000. It was told by Mr Burke that it was his to do as he liked with, but he agreed to pass over £10,000 to the party.

SO, given that Fianna Fail knew that the payment to Ray Burke had been £30,000, why would it have issued a receipt, as it has claimed, to Rennicks Manufacturing Ltd for just £10,000? Yes, that was all that the headquarters received. But Rennicks Manufacturing Ltd made a payment on behalf of Fitzwilton of £30,000 and Fianna Fail believed that the full £30,000 was intended for it. Ray Burke insisted the full £30,000 was for him. So either Fianna Fail should have issued a receipt to Rennicks Manufacturing Ltd/Fitzwilton for the full £30,000 or it simply should have issued a receipt to Ray Burke for £10,000.

And isn't it quite amazing that this very curious receipt for £10,000 to Rennicks Manufacturing should have gone missing in the post? It never reached Rennicks.

There is a further curiosity about that receipt.

Geraldine Kennedy reported last Saturday that the receipt for £10,000 issued by Fianna Fail to Rennicks was dated "9 Mmh" (the abbreviation for June in Irish) 1989. But it has been established that Ray Burke did not make the transfer of the £10,000 until June 16th, 1989. So how is it that the receipt for the £10,000 is dated seven days earlier?

Now to the issue of the Fitzwilton accounts.

If indeed the £30,000 payment by Fitzwilton, intended for Fianna Fail, was accounted for as such in the Fitzwilton accounts, then we can be assured that the payment was indeed meant to support "the democratic process in Ireland", as Fitzwilton has stated. The only scepticism one has about this, apart from the unusual manner of the payment, is the absence of a receipt for the amount paid.

IF, HOWEVER, the £30,000 was not accounted for as a political donation to Fianna Fail in the Fitzwilton accounts or in some other manner, then difficult questions need to be answered by Fitzwilton about what was going on. There is no reason now to believe that anything improper was going on.

But what of Fianna Fail?

From the Geraldine Kennedy story of last Saturday we also know that Fianna Fail knew full well, from June 1989 onwards, that Mr Burke had got £30,000 from Fitzwilton. And we are expected, apparently, to believe that nobody remembered anything about this when the fuss arose last August about the other £30,000 payment in June 1989 to Ray Burke.

As was pointed out in this column last Wednesday, Dermot Ahern speaking in the Dail a fortnight ago said: "To the best of my knowledge, at the time of the appointment of Mr Burke the Taoiseach, having made all the inquiries he could reasonably have made, had discovered no proof that any payment, improper or otherwise, had been made to Mr Burke".

How could Bertie Ahern not have known last June that Ray Burke had received £30,000 from Fitzwilton in June 1989? If he did not know it from his own recollections of the time, how was it that nobody in the Fianna Fail headquarters told him of this?

But then, as was pointed out here last week, he certainly knew in August 1997 (two months after he had appointed Ray Burke to the Cabinet, supposedly on the understanding that Ray Burke had received no payments "improper or otherwise") that Ray Burke had received £30,000 from JMSE in June 1989. So he must have known then that what Ray Burke told him two months previously was a lie.

Unless.

Unless he had known all along that Ray Burke had got money in June 1989.

But if that is so, why would he have left his super-sleuth Dermot Ahern in ignorance of that, especially when Dermot Ahern was supposedly investigating whether there was any truth to the rumours about Ray Burke getting payments in June 1989?

Now if Bertie Ahern knew that Ray Burke had got money in June 1989, why would he have appointed Ray Burke to the Cabinet? And why would he have pretended to undertake an investigation to discover what he knew already?