A partner in Deloitte & Touche agreed at the tribunal yesterday that it looked as though the absence of one Guinness & Mahon bank statement from a sequence of statements had not been picked up when his company was preparing the accounts.
Mr Paul Carty, a partner in Deloitte and Touche chartered accountants and previously of Haughey Boland, had been asked about the statement, which related to 1985.
The tribunal heard previously that in 1975 Princes Investments Ltd, which manages the Mount Brandon Hotel in Tralee, took out a loan with Guinness & Mahon for £116,000. The loan was backed by money in the Ansbacher deposits and paid off with money from the deposits in September 1985.
A bogus bank statement was produced a month later purporting to show that the loan still existed.
In July 1987, Princes Investments repaid the loan in the sum of £260,000 to Guinness & Mahon. As far as could be seen, the sum did not go into Guinness & Mahon coffers but to an account of Amiens Securities Ltd, an account controlled by Mr Des Traynor.
A sum of £40,000 out of the total amount went into an account used to discharge the living expenses of Mr Charles Haughey.
Yesterday, Mr Carty, who was an adviser to Princes Investments, said he had no knowledge of the loan being repaid in September 1985, or of funds being transferred to Amiens.
Mr John Coughlan SC, for the tribunal, said Deloitte & Touche prepared the accounts for the company. One bank statement was missing from the accounts of Guinness & Mahon.
"If your firm had received the bank statement which is missing from Guinness & Mahon now, in other words, it was not microfiched for recording purposes, if your company had received the bank statement for the period covering September 1985, that would have disclosed a zero balance on the loan accounts because it had been paid off from an offshore account. If that had come to the attention of your firm, the accounts would have been prepared differently," Mr Coughlan said.
"That's correct, yes," said Mr Carty.
"Would the person who would have been doing the preparatory work in relation to the accounts have bank statements for any given year or previous years and recognise that they should be sequential?" asked Mr Coughlan.
Mr Carty said he would expect so.
Mr Coughlan asked if they could take it or rule it out, that if a bank statement had come into Mr Carty's firm showing a zero balance, his firm would not have prepared accounts showing an indebtedness.
Counsel asked: "So at the very least, there must have been one bank statement missing from the sequence . . . and obviously that was not picked up."
"It looks that way, yes," said Mr Carty.
Mr Tom Clifford, a shareholder in Princes Investments, said they took out the loan in 1975 for hotel refurbishment. He said he had no knowledge of the repayment of the loan in 1985.
He said Mr John Byrne, a property developer, was also a shareholder in the company, and he provided £100,000 each and another £60,000 from the hotel to pay off the loan in 1987.