Padraig Collery, the man who helped run the Ansbacher tax-evasion scheme from the registered office of CRH, has been disqualified from being involved in the management of any company for nine years.
Collery was a close associate of the late Des Traynor, the former CRH chairman and long-time accountant to Charles Haughey who was the main representative in the State for Ansbacher (Cayman) Ltd, the Cayman Islands company at the centre of the affair. After Traynor's death in 1994, he became its Irish representative.
Collery is the first person to be disqualified by the High Court as a result of court inquiries into the affair, which found evidence showing that he assisted the company in carrying on an unlicensed banking business, failing to furnish details to the Registrar of Companies, evading tax and assisting others to evade tax.
Ms Justice Mary Finlay-Geoghegan said Collery's conduct in the management of the Ansbacher scheme and an associated scheme called Hamilton Ross "was of a particularly serious nature" and merited a 12-year disqualification but fixed the term at nine years after taking a number of mitigating factors into account.
"The conduct of Mr Collery from 1991 to 1997 in relation both to Ansbacher and Hamilton Ross as found by the inspectors is such as to make him unfit to be concerned in the management of a company," she said in her judgment.
The disqualification was welcomed by the Director of Corporate Enforcement, Paul Appleby. "The message for others from today's judgment is that the use of corporate structures for unlawful purposes is not worth the potential damage to personal and corporate reputation."
Collery, who is a banking software expert, did not contest the application and put no evidence before the court. A central figure in the affair for more than 20 years, he began work in the merchant bank Guinness & Mahon in 1974. He was responsible for computer operations and was taken into the confidence of Traynor, then a director of the bank.
Collery kept the "memorandum accounts" which recorded who owned what within the deposits. These accounts used codes. When Traynor left Guinness & Mahon, Collery continued to take instructions from him. Collery left the bank in 1989, around the same time that Traynor moved the deposits to IIB Bank, the former Irish Intercontinental Bank.
The accounts were moved from the Guinness & Mahon computer system to a computer kept in Traynor's office in CRH, a company he chaired between 1987 and 1994. Collery would let himself into the CRH offices on Saturday mornings and make entries to the memorandum accounts using the documentation generated during the week by Traynor. Collery helped move the files to another office after Traynor died and maintained them until their discovery in 1997 by the McCracken Tribunal.
