Bertie Ahern (Dublin Central, Fianna Fail)

My independent expert, Mr. Stronge, having analysed the documentation with the branch and from the remit room in AIB headquarters, has concluded that the evidence does not substantiate a lodgment of US$45,000.

There has been much confusion about the basis for the opinion of Mr. Stronge. He prepared his preliminary report that was submitted to the tribunal having heard all the evidence. That evidence which concluded with the evidence of Rosemary Murtagh finished on Tuesday, 11 September 2007. As I was giving evidence on the Thursday morning, a preliminary report could only be furnished to me at that stage. This is the preliminary report to which I referred in my statement at the opening of the tribunal. That preliminary report and its conclusions is based solely and exclusively on the branch and the remit room documentation. The view is abroad that the report of Mr. Stronge which was put in evidence at the tribunal on Monday, was based on 67 material or actual calculations; this is not so. The mathematical formula by which those calculations are carried out was perfectly valid and they are based on the evidence of banking witnesses given up to the end of July. However, the Allied Irish Bank's evidence changed in September and because that evidence changed the calculations were therefore no longer applicable. As I emphasise this point, this is not the factual basis for the opinion contained in the report of Mr. Stronge. His conclusions are based on entirely separate and distinct reasoning. It is based on the evidence of the documentation of Allied Irish Bank and not on the 67 calculations. This is the reason I am now availing of this opportunity to nail the lie that I have somehow failed to establish that there was no $45,000. Mr. Stronge is a distinguished banker and is the former chief operating officer of Bank of Ireland corporate banking and lectures in financial reporting at the Smurfit Graduate School of Business and is a financial statement analyst at the National College of Ireland. He will be giving evidence to the tribunal in due course that the AIB evidence and documentation does not substantiate a lodgment of US$45,000. Mr. Stronge is a truly independent witness. I do not know him; I have never met him; I have never had a discussion with him. My lawyers retained him as an independent expert. In this context, the branch documentation is relied upon to demonstrate that my evidence is wrong. Such an assertion ignores the reality of the evidence already given by bank officials. They have acknowledged that what are known as the narratives on the banking documentation are of no accounting significance and are unreliable. They have told the tribunal that it is very possible that the sterling and dollar sums were transcribed onto the wrong sheets but that this had no accounting significance because all sums were expressed in Irish pounds and so long as the Irish pounds sums balanced, no issue would arise. If $45,000 had been lodged to the branch, the branch would have remitted that sum to the remit room in bank headquarters. However, the remit room documentation is not consistent with remittal of US$45,000. Accordingly, the narrative on the documentation in the branch must be wrong. It contains a simple and understandable error and one which the bank is not concerned with because it has no accounting significance. This is the type of error which the bank officials readily acknowledge can occur and in this case it has occurred. I wish to be clear that I did not receive US$45,000, I did not receive the sum of Italian lira 71.5 million, and I did not receive French francs FF237,700. The money was a combination of sterling and punts. These are the facts as brought out before the tribunal. It is the truth. I am satisfied that my evidence will be vindicated in this regard.

On the matter of discovery, I made discovery in accordance with the requirements of the tribunal. The chairman of the tribunal has made it clear that there is no suggestion that there is some document I have failed to discover. I have given hundreds upon hundreds of pages of discovery and answered questions, not just about five lodgements but about 86 lodgments. They have included questions about money spent on the education of my children, on the maintenance of my wife and I have dealt with these issues in exhaustive detail. As there appears to be a lingering suspicion about the quality of my discovery — although this is a matter for the tribunal — I will now address it in this House.

I intend to address separately a number of recurring themes. The first is the Michael Wall money. The moneys lodged to the Celia Larkin account on 5 December 1994 belong to Michael Wall. They were applied in respect of works to the house at 44, Beresford. This was the house which he bought and he owned. The moneys on deposit in that account were not my moneys nor were they applied for my benefit. In so far as I and my lawyers are concerned, this was not an account in respect of which discovery applied.

On the second issue of the Celia Larkin £50,000, I informed the tribunal that I transferred money to Celia Larkin's account in December 1994. I did this in a letter to the tribunal on 7 February 2005. There is no mystery about this. While the money was my money, the account was not my account — it was Celia Larkin's account. However, I wanted to make it plain to the tribunal that I transferred my moneys to her account. This I did by referring to this fact in the letter of 7 February and it accompanied my affidavit of discovery. I spent night after night and many weekends and days addressing the issue of discovery. I unearthed a voluminous amount of documentation. I disclosed more than 20 accounts in my name or in the joint names of my wife and I or in the names of my daughters. I did not consciously or wilfully omit any account from affidavit of discovery. I believe this is also my lawyers' view and I fully complied with and discharged my discovery obligations. The legal issues in this regard are being addressed to the tribunal by the lawyers representing the tribunal and my legal team, if the need arises. However, I am satisfied I have done nothing wrong.

On the issue of alleged delay, there is a false view that I did not make discovery for two and a half years but this is untrue. Not only did I make a discovery on 7 February 2005 and on 27 March 2006, I gave to the tribunal — although not obliged by law to do so — two letters of authorisation given on 10 June 2005 and on 6 April 2006. These authorised the tribunal to interview my bankers and obtain all bank documents and I thereby waived confidentiality. Hence the tribunal had full access to my accounts and information concerning those accounts. The tribunal also obtained discovery against Allied Irish Bank and I consented to that discovery. Moreover, during the greater part of this period the tribunal was precluded by court order from inquiring in public into Quarryvale two. Thus while I was dealing with the tribunal, there were court orders affecting how the tribunal could deal with Quarryvale two. The way was only cleared for it to conduct that public inquiry when the Supreme Court gave a judgment in the Owen O'Callaghan case on 30 March 2007. Before this, the public inquiry could not proceed. An injunction against it so proceeding was granted by a High Court judge on 8 December 2005.

I refer to the issue of a limit of £30,000 on discovery. Because of the potential extent of the discovery sought by the tribunal, through my lawyers I sought to limit it to sums of £30,000 and above. What was the basis for this? In the Denis "Starry" O'Brien litigation, a High Court judge, at the request of my counsel, limited discovery to the sum of £50,000 and above. This was because the allegation then being made by Denis "Starry" O'Brien was that I had received a bribe of £50,000 from Owen O'Callaghan. The principle informing the making of that order in the High Court is exactly the same principle which my lawyers sought to apply to discovery to the tribunal where the allegations I was then facing involved the assertion that I received £50,000 in 1989 and £30,000 sometime in or around 1992. Hence, the approach suggested at the tribunal by my lawyers in relation to discovery was one based on exactly what happened in the High Court when discovery was being addressed in the Denis "Starry" O'Brien case. This was the approach I suggested be followed. Whether it would have been followed or not, it would have been absolutely clear that I was not operating bank accounts at the time and that this was the case from the 1980s. Second, in making my actual discovery on 7 February 2005, I made it clear, as I would have done in all circumstances, that I had not operated bank accounts since the 1980s, including the period from the actual separation from my wife.

On the issue of the changing of evidence, the fundamentals of my evidence have remained the same. I have added some detail and elaborated in some areas for reasons which I will explain. I make no apologies for giving my best recollection when giving evidence. It is a matter of reality that one's recollection can be helped as new information comes to light. This has occurred in my case and I will explain the reason.

In the run-up to this year's election, the transcripts were leaked to the media. An issue arose in relation to a lodgment in June and another in December, which totalled £30,000 sterling. I had already confirmed to the tribunal that these were sterling lodgements when I met its representatives on 5 April last. On foot of the publicity surrounding the illegal leaks of the manuscripts, I was contacted by a number of people. They recalled for me that I had in fact looked at houses in early 1995. This refreshed my memory that in fact at one stage I was not going to proceed with the deal with Michael Wall and, therefore, returned the money to him. Hence, the rationale for converting punts into £30,000 sterling. It was because of the leaks during the general election that this information was brought to my attention. Hence, I informed the tribunal of this when I was giving my evidence.

Second, on 21 April 2006, a report from my accountant Des Peelo was sent to the Mahon tribunal. It stated that the sum of circa £8,000 sterling was lodged. There is a very simple explanation for this. The lodgement of 11 October was one I knew included some of the Manchester money, but I could not be precise as to the exact composition of the amount lodged. The report from Mr. Peelo relied on the Central Bank rate rather than the precise exchange rate applicable in Allied Irish Banks on that day. The published AIB rates were not available to me or to him at that time which meant that, of necessity, the sterling sum could not be exact. It was the use of the Central Bank rate that created the uncertainty. I did not see the actual bank conversion rates used by AIB until after the private session with the tribunal on 5 April 2007.

I said in the private session that I did not recollect purchasing the £30,000 sterling, but assumed I had purchased it in AIB's O'Connell Street branch. I mentioned that the AIB branches on O'Connell Street and in Drumcondra were the only two banks with which I dealt. It became clear from the O'Connell Street branch documentation that I could not have purchased the sterling there. The tribunal has not circulated the AIB Drumcondra documentation. In either event, I cannot be precise as to where and when and by whom the money was purchased. I continue, however, to make inquiries.

The period of time under consideration was a difficult one in my life. I was busy attending to many obligations of holding office as Minister for Finance and then as leader of Fianna Fáil. If I am to be criticised for not having a precise and clear recollection of all matters of detail some 12 and 13 years on, so be it. I have done my best in recalling these events. Indeed, the very people who now criticise me for lack of recollection in detail are the ones who would regard precise recollection of every detail as suspicious. I have given my evidence as honestly as I can and to the best of my ability. The human mind makes mistakes of recollection, forgets details and mingles events. That is life.

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