About 5 per cent of Fianna Fáil fundraising activity in the mid-1990s was carried out in the form of controversial "pick-me-up" payments, the tribunal has heard.
Former Fianna Fáil fundraiser Des Richardson told the inquiry yesterday the system involved a person who wanted to make a donation picking up a bill owed by the party instead
The tribunal is currently investigating claims made by a member of a consortium which owned land at Cloghran near Dublin airport that he was asked by the lobbyist Frank Dunlop to pay money owed by Fianna Fáil to the advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi.
Mr Richardson said when he was appointed in 1993 his role had been to co-ordinate party fundraising. At the time Fianna Fáil was about £3 million (€3.8 million) in debt and it was also his job to try to reduce this figure. He had an office in the Berkeley Court Hotel in Dublin. Mr Richardson maintained that the pick-me-up system had been around for 40 years.
He said "pick-me-ups" were used by all parties. They represented a very small portion of overall fundraising, maybe to the tune of 5 per cent.
"Quite simply, if a donor wanted confidentiality in making a donation he would or could seek to pay by the pick-me-up or maybe one of our committee members might meet with a potential donor and explain that if he wanted to do it in confidence that this was a way of doing it," he said. "But I mean, there was nothing underhand about pick-me-ups. They were in the marketplace and they were recorded in the Fianna Fáil books."
Patricia Dillon SC, for the tribunal, suggested the person picking up the bill could reclaim the VAT involved if they treated the payment in their books as a business expense.
Mr Richardson said this was not necessarily the case. He said that when the then Fianna Fáil accountant (and current TD SeáFleming) had explained the system to him in 1993, he had said that a person taking up or requesting a pick- me-up was not in a position to reclaim the VAT because it was not a business transaction.
Ms Dillon: "Was that your invariable practice then, Mr Richardson, that you would have advised anyone with whom you organised a pick-me-up for Fianna Fáil that VAT was not reclaimable?"
Mr Richardson: "Yes, I have done that."
Ms Dillon: "Have you done that in all cases?"
Mr Richardson: "I have done that to the best of my knowledge."
Asked about a list of individuals who had tables at a Fianna Fáil event at the Galway races, Ms Dillon suggested that they represented a series of pick-me-up payments made to the caterers, Lydon House, but which were treated within Fianna Fáil as donations to the party.
Mr Richardson said that they were payments for tables. He said that some had paid VAT because they had been charged it by Lydon House. However he said that that did not mean they could reclaim the VAT.
