By Jody Corcoran From Sunday Independent

High Court Inspectors did not share the Authorised Officer’s view that well-known people may have been tax defaulters, reveals Jody Corcoran

Over a decade ago I received a telephone call from a man known to me who was familiar with certain events in the Grand Court in the Cayman Islands.

At the time, the so-called “Ansbacher accounts” were all the rage in Dublin, arising out of revelations related to the financial affairs of Charles Haughey.

Everybody wanted to know – who else had an Ansbacher account? In Dublin society, the rumours were rife and speculation rampant, but nobody knew for sure.

Several journalists were on the trail for months, if not years, at that stage – me included. Then this particular day I got a telephone call from the man concerned.

Could I meet him in a certain Dublin hotel?

– “What about?”

– “Ansbacher”.

An hour later I returned to the office, a file under my arm so heavy it was difficult to carry, which contained voluminous documents.

It contained the names of the so-called Ansbacher account holders, all of them, which were subsequently to be revealed in the official inspector’s report and others which were not.

Not only that, but there was other evidence too, dating back to January 8, 1998, when the then-Minister for Enterprise Trade and Employment Mary Harney issued a warrant for the appointment of Gerard Ryan as Authorised Officer to Ansbacher (Cayman) Limited.

All these years later, Mr Ryan is in the news again; this time he is referred to as a “whistleblower”. I should emphasise that Mr Ryan had no act, hand or part in disclosing the Ansbacher file to me.

The file contained more than just the names of the Ansbacher account holders, much more.

It included correspondence over several years between Mr Ryan and Ansbacher; between Mr Ryan and several of those who were subsequently to be identified as Ansbacher account holders; transcripts of evidence given by those Irish Ansbacher clients in interviews with Mr Ryan; copies of ledgers, deposits and withdrawals, quite literally the official accounts from Guinness & Mahon bank in Dublin dating back decades to 1972.

For example, one of the appendices stated the “approximate levels” of Guinness Mahon Cayman Trust funds placed with London and Dublin banks at any one time were IR£110m and – it was difficult to read the photocopy – IR£40m (I think) respectively.

Another appendix includes what’s called Ansbacher payments listings; that is, sums paid between 1991 and 1997, by whom and to whom, among other things, for college fees in the UK, for example, and for antique collectables or luxury items at Sotheby’s and Harrods.

It was evident from the list that the great and the good, that is the professional classes in Dublin – lawyers, accountants, bankers – were engaged in what seems to have been routine, indeed, daily business interactions with Ansbacher (Cayman) Ltd via Guinness & Mahon bank.

The list also contained two curious payments, on December 8, 1993, to the Chief Special Collector (IR£100,317) and Collector General (IR£49,151). Also to catch the eye was a payment to the Bank Bar, Zurich (a Swiss account) for £1.6m on December 17, 1992; and another interesting payment, £70,590 to An Post on October 6, 1994.

The full details were, and remain astonishing – but that’s not all, far from it.

There was another entire appendix on a claim by Mr Ryan that a publicly-listed company had engaged in an illegal share-support scheme on behalf of the directors.

This is what Mr Ryan wrote to the secretary of Ansbacher (Cayman) Ltd on May 6, 1999:

“My enquiries to-date have revealed evidence suggesting that Ansbacher (Cayman) Ltd and its Irish officers may have committed a number of unlawful acts in Ireland. In particular, the documentation which I have examined suggests that Ansbacher (Cayman) Ltd and/or its officers have … been a party to illegal share support schemes on behalf of directors of one or more Irish public companies.”

I recall I contacted at the time a PLC identified. It replied by way of solicitor, emphatically denying Mr Ryan’s claim and threatening to sue to high heaven if I suggested otherwise. There the matter rested in the absence of definitive evidence.

And there was more, much more: the file contained the identities of certain individuals Mr Ryan claimed were Ansbacher account holders, or holders of accounts in related trusts and various entities, many of them household names, well-known individuals in Irish society who have never been publicly associated with Ansbacher before or since.

I contacted several of these people; some admitted to having a banking arrangement with Guinness & Mahon, but strenuously denied involvement in any tax illegality; others just threatened to sue for defamation, if I remotely linked them to wrongdoing in the feverous atmosphere at the time.

But nowhere in the file were contained the names of the politicians identified by Mr Ryan in his whistleblowing report to the Public Accounts Committee and named by Mary Lou McDonald in the Dail last week. Nowhere. Not even a hint.

Mr Ryan submitted his report to the Minister on June 22, 1999.

Also in the file was an affidavit, dated February 1, 2001, sworn by John Bryan Bothwell, managing director of Ansbacher (Cayman) Ltd.

By this stage the High Court in Dublin had appointed three Inspectors to take up the trail, including the late Mr Justice Declan Costello. According to Mr Bothwell’s affidavit, Mr Ryan’s report concluded with a chapter entitled ‘Views of the Authorised Officer’. Mr Ryan’s view was that Ansbacher Cayman Ltd “had provided offshore trust and banking services to a substantial number of Irish individuals which appeared to him to have been designated to facilitate tax fraud”, according to Mr Bothwell’s affidavit.

The Authorised Officer’s report had also listed the names of 111 individuals whom Mr Ryan alleged to have had “some form of client relationship” with Ansbacher.

With the exception of approximately six individuals, all of those named in Mr Ryan’s report were also named in Inspector’s lists.

The identifies of those six – not politicians – are known to me: as I have said, some are well known, and in several instances, powerful individuals, but they had clearly made a case, accepted by the High Court Inspectors, that Mr Ryan’s view was incorrect, a view we now know to be shared by the six politicians identified in such a cavalier manner by Mary Lou McDonald last week.

For more on this story go to: http://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/powerful-names-cleared-before-final-report-on-ansbacher-30804964.html

See also related iNews Cayman story with additional links published November 24 2014 “Brian Lenihan Snr and Haughey named in Ansbacher file – Former Tanaiste held Cayman Island” at: http://www.ieyenews.com/wordpress/brian-lenihan-snr-and-haughey-named-in-ansbacher-file-former-tanaiste-held-cayman-island/