Defiant PAC chairman to pursue tax evasion file
The chairman of the Dail’s spending watchdog, John McGuinness, is to defy his own committee’s legal advice and will seek to investigate the controversial Ansbacher dossier on tax evasion.
Should he get his way, the door would be opened to allow the identities of several former Fianna Fail TDs and one Fine Gael minister contained in the controversial dossier, who engaged in this “evasion” back in the 1980s, to be revealed.
The Sunday Independent has learnt the identities of those former politicians named in the dossier, but is legally precluded from disclosing them.
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has been told that it could not legally deal with allegations claimed in the dossier, but several members are keen to have the matter investigated.
The committee was also told that the Department of Jobs official, Gerry Ryan, who was appointed by Mary Harney to investigate the offshore accounts in 1998, is not covered by the terms of the Government’s new whistleblower legislation.
Mr McGuinness is seeking to have the committee formally accept the document later this week, thus granting it parliamentary privilege. The Sunday Independent has learned that Mr McGuinness has been in “regular contact” with Mr Ryan in recent days.
Mr McGuinness and other members of the PAC, including Shane Ross, are anxious to offer Mr Ryan legal protection, despite the legal warnings. Without privilege, Mr Ryan is left exposed to potential legal prosecution from those individuals named in the dossier.
Mr McGuinness told the Sunday Independent that advice from a senior counsel, secured by Ryan, contradicts the current position that the PAC cannot examine the files. It has emerged that Mr Ryan has been working with Senior Counsel John Hennessy. It is understood he has been told that he is covered by the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 and that the PAC is well within its remit to investigate the document.
Mr McGuinness said: “The issue as to whether we can examine these files merits far more detailed scrutiny than the views of a solicitor; there needs to be closer scrutiny by government and the AG (Attorney General) of the Act.”
Mr Ross said: “It is important this man is protected. To do that is to make the dossier a privileged document.”
The PAC appears to be split on the Ansbacher file, with several Fine Gael members warning against taking it on. “We would be very slow to ignore legal advice given to us,” one said. Mr Ryan approached the PAC recently with a dossier which has accused successive ministers and state agencies of negligence in failing to follow up tax evasion.
A statement for the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation languished in Jobs Minister Richard Bruton’s office for almost two years before it was finally forwarded last week. Garda sources said that most of the allegations were already investigated in 2007 when the fraud squad interviewed the former bank manager who named nine politicians with secret offshore bank accounts, writes Maeve Sheehan.
The sources said they were unable to substantiate her account and as a result the politicians were never interviewed.
The woman, a former assistant manager at the bank, was interviewed first by Mr Ryan and later by the fraud squad. It is understood she said that in the late 1970s she saw nine senior politicians named in the so-called ‘Cayman Ledger’ along with their account balances. She is understood to have told detectives that she named the politicians from memory.
The Cayman Ledger was never located and sources said gardai did not interview the politicians because detectives didn’t have sufficient evidence of tax evasion.
