During the last few months of his life, John Furze would check the latest on the Dunnes tribunal first thing every day when he came into his third-floor offices outside George Town in the Cayman Islands.
A colleague would download that day's Irish Times from the Internet for him. It was not an obsession but Mr Furze was interested in the tribunal's progress and concerned about its effect on the reputation of his close friend, the late Mr Des Traynor.
Mr Furze had successfully opposed the tribunal's application to hear evidence on the Cayman Islands.
It was, say those who knew him, something he felt honour-bound to do since the tribunal wanted to gain access to information and documents about clients who had done business in the Cayman Islands precisely because they could be assured of confidentiality.
Mr Furze spent his own money on the legal case, friends say. He decided it was something he should do when it became clear that the Cayman bank concerned would not do it.
Friends insist that if the tribunal had been investigating a crime, there would have been no question of Mr Furze lodging an objection. Mr Furze made this point to them.
"The Cayman Islands is not somewhere you can hide when you've stolen money," says a friend. The Dunnes tribunal involved a situation where one man had given money to another man, with no favours given in return. The Dunnes payments tribunal "has no victims", says a friend of Mr Furze.
The day The Irish Times carried reports of how Charles Haughey had changed his story and was admitting having received £1.3 million, Mr Furze made no particular comment to his business partner, Mr Barry Benjamin.
"Yet I know that Des Traynor and his family were uppermost in his mind," says Mr Benjamin. As far as he knows, Mr Furze had met Mr Haughey once, at Mr Traynor's funeral in Ireland, and had only once and very briefly bumped into Mr Ben Dunne at a reception in Ireland. The subject matter of the Dunnes tribunal was "like a blast from the past" for Mr Furze, according to Mr Benjamin.
Mr Furze and Mr Benjamin worked together in the offices of International Insurance Management Corporation, a company Mr Furze set up in 1995 after he had left Ansbacher, a Cayman bank based in George Town. Mr Benjamin is unstinting in his praise of Mr Furze; his prodigious memory, ability to absorb detail and his huge capacity for work. He says Mr Furze spoke in similar terms about Des Traynor.
"I think he thought about Des Traynor the way I feel about John Furze," says Mr Benjamin.
A lot of memories and details died with John Furze in the Baptist Hospital, Miami, at 3.26 p.m. on Friday, July 25th. In so far as his financial dealings involving Mr Haughey and others are at issue, that is how it should be as far as Mr Furze would be concerned.
If Ireland's impression of him is that of a secretive figure involved in shady dealings, then it is completely at odds with the view on the Cayman Islands. The islands are a British dependent territory, the largest in the Caribbean, and are the most successful islands in the region because of the work of bankers such as Mr Furze.
Mr Furze is a public figure on the island, known for his generosity with time and money. Mr Benjamin says his death is a great loss to the country.
Mr Peter Balls, a former banker and, like Mr Benjamin, a fellow Freemason of Mr Furze, says simply: "John Andrew Furze was a great man."
Mr Furze was a founder and life member of the Cayman drama society; he was a member of the steering committee formed to establish the National Council of Social Services (social services are an almost alien concept in the Cayman Islands); he was a former president of the Rotary Club of the Grand Cayman; he headed a committee which organised and funded the Frances Bodden Girls' Home; he was vice-chairman of the Bonaventure Boys' Home, (like the girls' home, an institution for abandoned or orphaned children).
In 1988/89, Mr Furze was district governor for Rotary International District 404, a position which involved him having to visit every club on all the 13 Caribbean islands which make up the district. All this charitable work was done in time snatched from his busy work schedule.
Mr Furze was also "an active and outstanding Freemason" who joined the Cayman Lodge No 8153 in June 1982, and served as master of the lodge in 1990, according to Mr Balls. Another colleague says Mr Furze would sometimes spend three to four evenings a week with the local lodge.
Pressed as to what he would be doing, the source says he would at times practise for the rituals involved in initiating new members or bringing members to higher levels. Mr Furze was good at remembering the words and movements and timings involved.
It is not the case that the Cayman fraternity is composed predominantly of executives from the financial services sector and other senior figures in Cayman society, the source says.
"Freemasonary here is not a closed club for senior bankers and other high-up people. It's simply not the case here that everyone in a high position is a Freemason."
The source says local pastors have on occasion spoken out against Freemasonry and some prominent people on the island have left the organisation because of that. He never heard of Mr Traynor being a Freemason, and never heard Mr Furze say "my chairman is also a brother", something which would be likely as Mr Furze spoke so often about Mr Traynor.
"I guess he was a Catholic and I think it would be unlikely. It's not that Catholics are not welcome, it's just that their church doesn't like it."
In March 1988, in recognition of his community work on the Cayman Islands, Mr Furze was invited to Buckingham Palace, where Queen Elizabeth made him a Member of the British Empire.
But Mr Furze's main pursuit was not community work or Freemasonry but banking. It was banking that made him a rich man, paid for his £750,000plus home in the exclusive Governor's Harbour development, allowed him keep a boat in the Caribbean and breed horses in England that raced at Ascot.
The house in Governor's Harbour is one of the largest in a waterside development which is one of the prime locations on a high-income island. The property has a back lawn which leads to a wooden quay on the Caribbean. Jamaican gardeners tend the lawns.
According to official figures, US$460 billion is registered as on deposit in the 570 financial institutions, banks and trust companies based on the islands. It's a lot of money for a trio of islands that Columbus is said to have spotted in 1503, but deemed not worth stopping at because they looked so uninspiring.
These days, 35,000 people live on the 100 square miles of flat land that makes up the islands. Some 20,000 are Caymanians, a mixed race but predominantly coloured or black. The rest are expatriates, just over half of these being US or European citizens who tend to make very good livings. Some 7,000 are Jamaicans who do most of the menial jobs and are looked down on by the native population.
People place their money on the Cayman Islands because the laws stipulate that bankers or others involved in financial transactions can be fined or sent to jail for divulging details of financial transactions without their clients' consent.
This secretive cash-rich environment is one in which Mr Furze excelled. Born in Norwich in 1942, he joined Barclays Bank in 1961, having worked for three years in the civil service.
In 1966, he emigrated to the Bahamas, where he worked for the Bank of Nova Scotia Trust Company, in Nassau. He transferred to the Cayman Islands in 1967, and began working with John Collins at Bank of Nova Scotia Trust.
In 1972, Guinness & Mahon in Dublin, and more specifically Mr Traynor, established an operation on the Cayman Islands. Mr Furze and Mr Collins managed it for them. In 1974, with the establishment of the Guinness Mahon Cayman Trust, Mr Furze and Mr Collins took up positions as joint managing directors, having left Nova Scotia.
In 1988, Guinness Mahon Cayman Trust, which by then employed 35 people, was bought by Henry Ansbacher Holdings Ltd. The bank's name was changed to Ansbacher Ltd.
According to evidence heard by the tribunal in London, before the sale the bank had been sold by Guinness Mahon to the people who had basically established it: Mr Furze, Mr Collins and Mr Traynor.
A share was also held by Mr Hugh Hart, a Jamaican national who is an ex-minister of tourism and is chairman of Ansbacher Cayman. The four men sold a 75 per cent shareholding for around £6 million to Ansbacher. They retained 25 per cent for themselves before also selling that to Ansbacher. The bulk of the bank's business was with what the new parent company referred to as "the Irish accounts".
In 1989, Ansbacher bought Cayman International Trust Company and Mr Furze continued as joint managing director of the joint entity. But change was on its way. In its London hearings, the tribunal was told that Ansbacher Holdings was concerned about the "Irish accounts" the Cayman bank was holding. (These are what we now know as the Ansbacher Deposits.)
An investigation was launched. An executive subsequently described the difficulties as a clash of cultures, saying Ansbacher was a "bureaucratic" bank, whereas the Cayman operation was an "entrepreneurial" bank. Ansbacher decided to impose a single bureaucratic culture throughout its holdings.
It was around this time that Mr Furze is known to have moved Irish accounts to a fund management company called Hamilton Ross which he controlled.
This company took over accounts, including Mr Haughey's, from Ansbacher, and moved monies from Ansbacher to open its own accounts in the Irish Intercontinental Bank in Dublin. Presumably, the move allowed Mr Furze the freedom to continue working with his Irish clients in the personal, secretive and almost informal way he had established during the Guinness & Mahon period.
It was money from the Ansbacher and later the Hamilton Ross accounts which supplied the money which in turn paid Mr Haughey's living expenses of around £300,000 per year. Mr Furze managed the accounts; it is not clear who will or has already taken them over.
Mr Furze's demise has come as a great blow to many people on the Cayman Islands. Friends speak of how he had heart trouble over the last few years and knew he should slow down.
But he still put in long hours in his new company, as well as continuing his Rotary and Freemason activities. He found it difficult to walk away from work.
Mr Furze's body was cremated in Miami and his ashes brought back to his adopted home. At the time of Mr Traynor's funeral, key individuals met and new arrangements were made concerning the Haughey finances. Perhaps similar messages will be passed on during today's service for Mr Furze at the Church of God, an Evangelical Protestant church close to George Town.
As well as Mr Furze's Austrian wife, Ingrid, and their three sons, his two sons from a previous marriage will attend the service as will friends and colleagues from England, Austria and Ireland. The service will be a major event in the business and social life on the islands.
