LODGEMENT:A CASH lodgement of $45,000 in a Dublin bank in December 1994 was a lodgement of money belonging to Bertie Ahern, the tribunal decided.
Mr Ahern was interviewed in private by the tribunal in the offices of his solicitors, Frank Ward Co, in Dublin, on April 5th, 2007.
During the interview Mr Ahern said Manchester businessman Michael Wall gave him stg£30,000 over the weekend in December 1994 to fund work on a house on Beresford Avenue, Dublin, which Mr Wall was to buy and Mr Ahern to live in.
He said he gave the money to his then partner, Celia Larkin, to lodge on the following Monday. She lodged the money to an account in AIB in her name.
Mr Ahern was told that information from AIB did not support the claim that the amount lodged, £28,772.90, was the proceeds of stg£30,000. However the customer buy rate for dollars on the day produced an exact match if the £5 commission was charged.
“The suggestion that the source of the lodgement might have been US dollars was firmly rejected by Mr Ahern,” the report said.
In a public statement on May 13th, 2007, Mr Ahern said the money lodged was “mostly in sterling, though there might have been some Irish pounds as well.”
The tribunal said this was the first time it had been suggested that the lodgement, which had also been discussed in private with Ms Larkin and Mr Wall, might have been anything other than exactly stg£30,000.
The tribunal report includes a detailed account of the documentation available from the AIB archives relevant to the currency issue, and a consideration of testimony from AIB personnel.
The bank records showed how much sterling was bought by the branch each day, and the amount of non-sterling foreign currency bought. The tribunal found that the records showed that the total amount of sterling bought on Monday, December 5th, by AIB O’Connell Street, Dublin, was worth £1,921.53.
The bank’s records recorded the amount of non-sterling foreign currency bought was worth £28,969.34. Furthermore, more central records showed that the branch remitted foreign currency with a value of £29,254.97 to the central Currency Services department of AIB at the close of business.
The Remits Book that recorded this figure indicated that the money was “either sterling or US dollars and no other currency”, the tribunal said.
It reproduced in great detail evidence heard from AIB officials about the application of exchange rates and conducted mathematical exercises using the sterling and dollar rates in use on the day.
It decided that the “overwhelming weight of the evidence established as a matter of the strongest probability” that the money lodged was $45,000. It rejected Mr Ahern’s evidence about getting sterling from Mr Wall.
It said the money lodged had been Mr Ahern’s but that Mr Ahern’s failure to give a truthful account as to its source, rendered the tribunal unable to say where it came from.
