Where report goes next indicates what's in it, Colm Keena suggests
It was said in the High Court yesterday that simply to be named in the Ansbacher report as being a customer of the Cayman bank was not in itself damaging to a person's good name.
That might be true in the world as described by the statute books, but in the Four Courts yesterday a lot of money was spent by people who were concerned about their good name being damaged by its simple appearance in the long-awaited report.
At the start of yesterday's hearing, some of the most eminent senior counsel in the Four Courts stood in line to announce their interest in the case.
About half of them were appearing for unidentified clients due to be named in the Ansbacher report.
This reporter counted 17 different parties represented in court, including State bodies and unnamed Ansbacher customers.
If each senior counsel was getting €3,800 for his or her appearance, then the afternoon's proceedings cost €64,600 without taking into account the cost of junior counsel and solicitors.
The biggest indicator as to why people wouldn't want to be in this report was the list of agencies which the judge, the President of the High Court, Mr Justice Finnegan, said might merit being sent a copy.
These included the Central Bank; the Minister for Finance; the Revenue Commissioners; British Inland Revenue Service; the British Financial Services Authority; the British Department of Trade and Industry; the US Internal Revenue Service, and the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority.
The Director of Public Prosecutions was another agency mentioned.
In their report the inspectors had not identified people as having committed offences, the court heard. However they had found in relation to some people that there was evidence "tending" to indicate that offences had been committed.
The inspectors, the court heard, had pointed out in their report that there were customers named who took out loans from Ansbacher but who did not have deposits and so committed no tax offence.
There were also persons named who set up trusts through Ansbacher but never put any money into them.
For those, however, who had a less innocent run-in with Ansbacher, the vista ahead is one of public identification as an Ansbacher account-holder, followed or alongside a Revenue investigation and publication of any resulting settlement in Iris Oifigúil.
Depending on their dealings with the Cayman bank, they may also face inquiries from the British or US authorities.
Some may even find themselves being called for interview by the Garda or even being charged with criminal offences.
The extent to which any of those named in the report find themselves at the centre of such developments will be a measure of the extent to which Irish society has or has not changed when it comes to prosecuting white-collar crime.
Each such development, while being traumatic for those directly involved, will serve to further discomfort those who are named in the report despite having done nothing wrong. Such is the nature of the legal system we operate, as Mr Justice Finnegan put it.
It is overwhelmingly in the public interest that the suspicions which have been raised by the whole Ansbacher controversy are either confirmed or put to rest.
In the public mind innocent parties may be unfairly lumped in with less innocent parties, and it now seems there is nothing they can do about it. Life is sometimes unfair.
Immediately after the judge's decision, barristers involved said they saw little or no prospect of an appeal to the Supreme Court. The quick and decisive way the matter was dealt with by Mr Justice Finnegan seemed to take everyone by surprise, so much so that no one seemed to have a definite plan as to how the State would go about publishing the massive report.
Later, the Director of Corporate Enforcement, Mr Paul Appleby, said all the "hype" about the Ansbacher affair had become a little "overblown". The public, he believed, might have built up unreasonable expectations on the back of this. A lot of the names in the report will not be known to the public. Unreasonable expectations of fresh revelations may exist. But there was no hiding his pleasure at what had occurred.
He has been involved in the Ansbacher saga from as far back as 1997 when the McCracken tribunal first discovered the bank's secret operations here. He described Mr Justice Finnegan's decision as "momentous".
He's probably right in relation to the latter point. The Ansbacher operation was, after all, a clandestine, unauthorised banking service run by the late Des Traynor, the personal financial adviser to former Taoiseach Mr Charles Haughey, and used by Mr Haughey as well as members of the business elite from Mr Haughey's era.
It is impressive that the State has taken upon itself to investigate this and to make public the details of what it has discovered.