Ex-senior bank officer to reject claim concerns were ignored

A former senior officer with the Central Bank will reject suggestions from a former colleague that she ignored his stated concerns…

A former senior officer with the Central Bank will reject suggestions from a former colleague that she ignored his stated concerns about Guinness & Mahon bank in the 1980s.

In his opening remarks at yesterday's tribunal, Mr Jerry Healy SC, for the tribunal, said Ms Ann Horan will deny any suggestions she ignored Mr Terence Donovan's concerns about loans backed by offshore accounts or deliberately kept this information out of the report into a Central Bank investigation of Guinness & Mahon's accounts in 1988.

Mr Healy said the bureau system, "an expression used to describe what was originally a manual record which later became a computerised record, of Ansbacher dealings involving the recording of Ansbacher transactions across individual accounts", had only come to the notice of Guinness Mahon & Co in London in 1989. The London bank was the parent of the Dublin bank.

However, the tribunal heard yesterday that in 1985, and almost certainly earlier, the system was being discussed by Mr Desmond Traynor with an executive director of Guinness Mahon & Co in London, Mr Bruce Ursell.

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Although Mr Traynor left Guinness & Mahon in 1986, his association with the company was not severed. A letter dated October 17th, 1985, from Mr Ursell to the late Mr Traynor shows he continued to have an office in a Guinness & Mahon building adjoining the bank's premises.

The letter showed Mr Traynor continued to have use of the services of the bank. His secretary was paid for by the bank for about a year after he ceased to be a director. He would have a computer to "tap into the Cayman bureau", he would be paid a salary of £12,500 along with a similar sum in Grand Cayman, and his telephone costs would be paid.

Mr Ursell's letter said the company would "be pleased" to have Mr Traynor as chairman of Guinness Mahon Cayman Trust for at least three years from the end of his employment with Guinness & Mahon.

The letter appears to show Guinness Mahon & Co London was "well aware" of the operation of what it calls the Cayman bureau, or the "bank within a bank" as it has sometimes been called, Mr Healy said.