The Congregation Leader of the Irish Christian Brothers, Brother Edmund Garvey, has said the order never possessed 100 million Canadian dollars, as suggested on a Prime Time programme last week.
He also said the Christian Brothers in Canada "never transferred anything to any offshore company for any purpose whatsoever", as also suggested on the programme. He accused the media of ignoring for the most part all efforts by the Brothers to "bring healing, recompense, justice, and a new way forward" and said information has been "spurned" (by the media) as had most of the good work done by the thousands of Christian Brothers the world over this past 200 years.
He said "the allegations, which gained currency in recent RTE Prime Time programmes, must have a quite unspecified and hidden agenda." This was denied in a statement by RTE yesterday, in which it "absolutely refutes" the remarks.
Prime Time based its report of the order having assets of 100 million Canadian dollars on a 1991 report of a financial task force set up by the Brothers in Canada which stated that in the Province of Canada and the West Indies they had at their disposal "in conservative terms, well over $100 million in assets."
Yesterday Brother Garvey said that included in the 1991 figure were estimated values ascribed to school and house properties "which were not owned by the Christian Brothers. In some instances educational or church authorities owned some of the properties and schools although they were managed, staffed, and occupied by the Christian Brothers."
In 1996 the Christian Brothers of Ireland in Canada went into voluntary liquidation, he said, realising 6.088 million Canadian dollars for which the liquidator remained responsible, not the Brothers.
Of that figure $2.5 million had already gone in legal fees, and a further $900,000 had gone to the liquidator in fees. He explained that a company, Richmond Newstreet, was set up in 1994 "to provide for a changing and developing role for the Congregational leadership in its intenational mission." It was a company established in Ireland and had been granted charitable status by the Revenue Commissioners.
It had never received any funding from Canada, nor had it ever been used to secrete funds from jurisdictions where the Christian Brothers were facing compensation settlements, he said.
Two of the company directors lived in Ireland, and he himself, though based in Rome, was an Irish citizen. All its meetings took place in Ireland and it submitted annual returns to the Companies Office, while the Revenue Commissioners "requested and received the financial statements last year for the year ended the 31st of December 31st, 1999," he said.
He continued that "recent media references, particularly in the RTE Prime Time programmes, to an offshore company with the innuendos of lack of accountability, or of tax avoidance, are totally incorrect and false." Suggestions and allegations that the Congregation in Canada, or in any other part of the world, had sequestered funds and assets into secret and inaccessible international accounts in order to avoid paying compensation to survivors for crimes committed in particular jurisdictions were untrue.
