Analysis:Bertie Ahern was not as certain yesterday on one dig-out" as he was last April, writes Colm Keena
The judges of the Mahon tribunal have been presented with a fair few reasons for being concerned about the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern's account of a large cash lodgement he made on Tuesday, October 11th, 1994.
The amount lodged was £24,838.49 and at the time Ahern's salary, as minister for finance, was about £42,000 annually, before tax. So the amount of cash lodged was very significant.
Ahern was pretty certain about how the lodgement came about when he met the tribunal for a private interview last April.
He said it was made up of two amounts, one of £16,500 he had been given by four friends in a "dig-out", the other being "circa £8,000 sterling" he was given at a dinner in Manchester. Both amounts were cash.
In a report he had drafted before his interview he named the four friends who had contributed to the dig out, and what each man had given: Paddy Reilly £3,500; Joe Burke £3,500; Barry English £5,000 and Dermot Carew, £4,500. The total comes to £16,500.
The author of the report, accountant Des Peelo, working on information given to him by Ahern, sought to establish how much had been given to Ahern in Manchester.
He subtracted £16,500 from the £24,838.49 lodged, and said this figure must have been the Irish pound equivalent of the sterling given in Manchester. Ahern adopted this report and passed it to the tribunal through his solicitors.
During his interview in April Ahern was asked about the make-up of the lodgement. "Are you certain £16,500 was the Irish contribution" [to the lodgement]?" he was asked.
"Yes," he said. He could identify that precisely, he said. Dermot Carew, who organised the "dig-out", "definitely gave me that".
It was then put to him: "So whatever isn't represented by the £16,500 Irish is the sterling amount?" To which he answered: "Yes."
There was a problem with this, however. The amount of the lodgement over and above £16,500 cannot be converted back into a round-figure sterling amount, using any of the exchange rates in use in the bank on the day in question. Yesterday Ahern seemed to accept this when Des O'Neill SC, for the tribunal, said this disproved Ahern's version of events.
By yesterday, however, Ahern had varied his account. In his opening statement on Thursday he said, firstly, that he "believed", and his friends believed, he was given £16,500, though he never counted the money when he got it. He put it in his safe in St Luke's, where it rested for a considerable period of time. "I cannot say with mathematical precision how much Irish cash was then lodged. It is likely that the cash sum in my safe was later added with other cash."
Yesterday he said: "To the best recollection of me and them (the four friends) that comes to £16,500. I can't be certain that that's not £16,400. I can't be certain its not £16,600. I can't be certain I didn't put in a few hundred, or take out a few hundred."
Ahern also said he may not have lodged all of the large denomination sterling notes he received in Manchester, and/or that he could have added some smaller denomination sterling notes when making the lodgement.
As O'Neill pointed out yesterday, Ahern's altered evidence meant the work carried out by the tribunal, where it applied various sterling rates to the money lodged over £16,500, to see if it could come up with an amount for the Manchester "donation", was now meaningless.
However, Ahern's altered version of the lodgement still presents difficulties. The branch concerned, AIB, O'Connell St, Dublin, took in about £2,000 sterling on an average day in 1994. On October 11th, 1994, it took in £27,491.95. If Ahern's account is correct, then his unusual lodgement of "circa £8,000 sterling" was accompanied by another or a number of other customers with unusually large amounts of sterling cash on that day.
Furthermore, one of the exchange rates for sterling in use in the branch on the day converts the amount lodged by Ahern back into exactly stg£25,000. This is some coincidence, if coincidence it is, given what O'Neill described as the "remarkable" nature of the amount involved, £24,838.49 - a five-figure amount, uneven, with an uneven number of pence added on.
Banks apply more favourable rates to their customers when larger amounts of foreign currency are exchanged. On October 11th, 1994, AIB gave a certain rate for amounts of sterling worth up to £500, a better rate for amounts up to £2,500 in value, and a better rate again for amounts up to £10,000 in value. For amounts worth more than £10,000, tellers were supposed to contact head office, to be given the "spot rate".
Ahern's lodgement comes out as stg£25,000 exactly if the rate for amounts worth up to stg£2,500 is applied. If, for the sake of argument, the spot rate had been the same as the £10,000 value rate, stg£25,000 would have realised £25,025.04, ie £186.55 more than Ahern received.
Ahern contends there is no way the bank would have "screwed" a serving Minister for Finance by applying a disadvantageous rate in this way, and that the lodgement was as he has described.
The bank's files show that in relation to another cash lodgement to the same AIB branch made by Ahern in December 1995, involving stg£20,000, the rate applied in the first instance was for values of up to £2,500, before this was corrected and the rate for amounts of a value of £10,000 substituted.
When O'Neill highlighted this, Ahern pointed out that the mistake had been noted and corrected. He said he was sure the judges would, in time, see his scenario for the lodgement as being the most likely.