CHARLES Haughey, Ben Dunne and Michael Lowry were on a wave of success in the period after 1987. Mr Haughey had become Taoiseach after 4 1/2 years in opposition. Mr Lowry had started a political career that would see him rise rapidly to chair his party and become a Cabinet Minister, as well as develop a successful business. Ben Dunne was heading the massive Dunnes Stores group at a time of major expansion.
Ten years later they have all experienced dramatic falls. Mr Haughey was ousted as Taoiseach, Mr Dunne was ousted from Dunnes Stores, Mr Lowry was ousted from the Cabinet.
While in public the careers of all three followed roughly parallel upward and downward curves, in private, the tribunal was told this week, they were all involved in an extraordinary secret flow of cash through offshore bank accounts.
In May 1987 Charles Haughey had been Taoiseach for three months. He and his Government had become worried about the imminent referendum on the Single European Act, as the No campaign gathered momentum.
He may also have been worried about his overdraft. The tribunal team has ascertained that in May 1987 his current account with Guinness & Mahon was overdrawn by more than a quarter of a million pounds - £261,000 to be exact. Then again this situation might have been less alarming to him than it would be to others overdrawn to such an extent. After all, his close friend, Des Traynor, was managing director of the bank.
The tribunal has heard that Mr Traynor took a very active role in organising Mr Haughey's finances. In November 1987, the tribunal has heard, Mr Traynor rang Noel Fox for the first time. Mr Haughey was in financial trouble, he said, and he needed a group of business people to give him £150,000 each to bail him out. Would Mr Fox, close friend and adviser to Ben Dunne, ask Mr Dunne if he would be one of them?
Asking Mr Dunne for money for Mr Haughey, it appeared this week, was like pushing an open door. Mr Dunne became very close to Mr Haughey at some stage during the 1980s according to evidence heard this week. Mr Dunne's sister, Margaret Heffernan, said yesterday that the two were "extremely close", while Mr Dunne said they had met 50 to 60 times, almost all such encounters taking place between 1987 and 1991.
Ben Dunne recalls deciding to pay the whole lot: involving a large number of people would have run the risk of the matter leaking out. He asked Mr Fox to ring Mr Traynor to tell him so, but to say that he needed to wait for a few months.
WITHIN days Mr Traynor rang back. The first instalment couldn't wait that long.
The first cheque - for the sterling equivalent of £205,000 - was to be made payable to John Furze. It was obtained from Dunnes Stores in Bangor, Co Down, and sent to Mr Fox who passed it on to Mr Traynor. Dated December 1st, 1987, it was paid into Barclays Bank in Knightsbridge. London, where Guinness & Mahon has an account. The money made its way to an account in the name of Ansbacher Ltd, a Cayman Islands bank, at Guinness & Mahon (Ireland).
Mr Dunne heard nothing more from Mr Traynor until June, which was also the month he bumped into Mr Jim Mitchell TD in Myo's pub, Castleknock. He gave him an unsolicited cheque for £5,000, half for his own constituency expenses and half for Mr Bruton's.
At the end of that month, Mr Haughey was admitted to hospital for treatment of a kidney stone complaint. He was not long out of the Mater private hospital when according to Mr Dunne and Mr Fox, Des Traynor was on the phone again.
This time he wanted about £500,000, to be made payable again to John Furze into an account in Barclays Bank Knightsbridge, London. The money was paid out of a dollar account in Zurich of which Mr Dunne was the beneficial owner. It was transferred first into a Swiss law firm's client account before heading for the Ansbacher account at Guinness & Mahon, via Barclays, London.
Mr Haughe~y, meanwhile, left on a six day visit to Australia. While he was away, a Government spokeswoman announced that Mr Haughey's wife, Maureen, was going to keep items of jewellery presented to her by Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia. The speculation at the time was that the gift was worth some £160,000.
BEN Dunne's business relationship with Michael Lowry began a few months after this. In January 1989 he two met in Mr Dunne's office and agreed that Mr Lowry - a TD for almost two years - would set up a refrigeration company to equip Dunnes Stores outlets in Munster and maintain their refrigeration equipment. Within months the arrangement had worked so well for Dunnes Stores that Mr Dunne asked Mr Lowry to expand his operation to cover all Dunnes Stores outlets in the State.
May 1989 was the month Mr Haughey dissolved the Dail, after spending 29 months heading a minority government, and called an election. It was his fifth attempt at winning an overall majority. It was also the month of Mr Traynor's third call to Mr Fox, according to Mr Dunne and Mr Fox.
This time he asked for £150,000 from Mr Dunne. It was paid into the Royal Bank of Scotland in London to the account of Henry Ansbacher Bank. It travelled to the same destination, the Ansbacher Ltd account at Guinness & Mahon, Dublin.
Within two months Mr Haughey led Fianna Fail into its first coalition government, with the Progressive Democrats.
Three months later, in October 1989, Mr Dunne met the then Fine Gael leader, Alan Dukes, for dinner in Barberstown Castle. They talked about the role of the opposition, according to Mr Dunne, following which he handed over a cheque for £30,000 and promised the same amount for each of the next two years.
In December 1989 Mr Dunne felt that Mr Lowry and his staff had being doing a great job for Dunnes Stores. Mr Lowry received £6,000 for Christmas bonuses for his staff.
In February 1990 Mr Haughey was into his second month of Ireland's presidency of the EC, a position that took Mr Haughey to the US to meet President Bush.
At the same time, Mr Traynor was on the phone to Mr Fox again. This time he wanted £200,000 sterling. This came from an account owned by Mr Dunne on the Isle of Man to Henry Ansbacher Bank in London and on to the same account at Guinness & Mahon (Ireland).
In October 1990 Mr Dunne decided to pay Mr Lowry a bonus of £25,000. His work already had produced major savings on refrigeration costs for the Dunnes Stores group, and on October 8th £25,000 was paid into an Isle of Man account for Mr Lowry from another Isle of Man account owned by Ben Dunne.
The same month, on October 25th, Ruairi Quinn walked into the Barge pub to host a table quiz designed to raise £200 to £300 for Mrs Mary Robinson's presidential election campaign. He joined a friend of his at the bar, who was talking to Mr Dunne. After a brief conversation about the cost of paying for television advertisements for the campaign, Mr Dunne went out to his car and returned with a cheque book. He borrowed Mr Quinn's pen to write a cheque for £15,000, payable to the Labour Party.
Mr Quinn told him he could keep the pen.
In December 1990, Mr Dunne decided to give a larger Christmas bonus to Mr Lowry's staff than the previous year. He paid £8,500 to Mr Lowry for the purpose.
On May 3rd, 1991, John Bruton was now leader of Fine Gael. He called to Ben Dunne's house in Castleknock, an encounter that had been arranged by Michael Lowry. After a discussion of about an hour Mr Dunne handed over a cheque for £50,000. Two months later in July Mr Lowry received £6,500 in connection with the storage facility he was setting up with the support of Dunnes Stores. The next month he received £40,000 into his Isle of Man account. By then, Mr Dunne told the tribunal, Mr Lowry had saved the group "hundreds of thousands" of pounds.
In October the Fianna Fail/PD Coalition government was under severe pressure. So was Mr Haughey. Five Cabinet Ministers had said they did not believe he would lead the party into the next election.
The immediate crisis revolved around his denials that he had held a meeting with Bernie Cahill, the Greencore chairman, about the privatisation of Irish Sugar. But it emerged in newspaper reports that he had indeed met Mr Cahill. John Bruton was calling for his resignation.
Things got worse in November. There were reports that Fianna Fail TDs had been led to believe he would step down within months. Yet on Saturday, November 9th, he survived a sustained heave against him, seeing off Albert Reynolds by 55 votes to 22.
Shortly after November 13th, 1991 - the date is unclear - Mr Ben Dunne called around to Mr Haughey's home in Kinsealy for a cup of tea. Mr Dunne felt Mr Haughey was not himself, he was down, a broken man. On his way out he handed him three bank drafts, each worth £70 000 sterling.
"Look," said Mr Dunne, "that's something for yourself."
"Thank you, big fella," Mr Haughey replied, according to Mr Dunne.
The next month Mr Dunne sent Mr Lowry his annual staff Christmas bonus, this time worth £8,000.
ON January 21st, 1992, Sean Doherty made the final, fatal assault on Mr Haughey's political career by saying that Mr Haughey had been aware that he was tapping journalists' telephones in 1982. On February 6th, 1992, after a last ditch struggle to hold on, Mr Haughey resigned as Taoiseach.
Around the same time - early 1992 - Mr Lowry told Mr Dunne that he intended to purchase and refurbish a house in Holycross, Co Tipperary. Mr Dunne appointed an architect and building contractor used by Dunnes Stores to carry out the work, Mr Lowry told the Dail last December. He said the financial arrangements should be left to Dunnes Stores.
On February 19th, 1992, Mr Dunne was arrested in Orlando, Florida, and charged with cocaine trafficking. In May of that year he pleaded no contest to a lesser charge of cocaine possession after the trafficking charge was dropped.
In May 1992 Mr Lowry received two payments from Mr Dunne, one of £50,000 drawn on Dunnes Stores and the following day one of £40,000 from Mr Dunne's Isle of Man account to Mr Lowry's. But Mr Lowry was getting worried about the informality of his arrangements for remuneration for his work.
He telephoned the Dunnes Stores group's chief accountant, Mr Michael Irwin, on a number of occasions seeking to have a reconciliation" done regarding the money he, was owed. He wanted to be paid. Mr Dunne told Mr Irwin he would sort it all out when he was back fully working in the company, but he never was.
In September/October 1992 he was removed as chairman of the group. In February 1993 he was removed as chief executive. Mr Lowry's unwritten arrangements with Mr Dunne were thrown into confusion, and Mr Lowry told the Dail last December that disagreement remains on the amount owed to him and the arrangements for refurbishing his house.
On May 13th, 1993. Mr Dunne was in the High Court at the start of his proceedings against members of his family and others to stop them transferring his shares within the Dunnes Stores holding company. The following day he sent another cheque to Fine Gael, this time for £100,000.
Mr Dunne met Mr Haughey 50 to 60 times during the period described above. He told the tribunal this week that he has met him twice since.
Though he has not given evidence to the tribunal, Mr Haughey has denied - in correspondence with lawyers for the Dunne family trust - receiving money from Ben Dunne. Yesterday Mr Dunne's solicitor disclosed the sensational information that he - the solicitor, Noel Smyth - had met Mr Haughey five times in recent months to discuss the affair.
What did they talk about? Next week, perhaps, we will find out.
