A financial advisor charged with money laundering told a car dealer to whom he had given £200,000 sterling to get rid of whatever cash he had left after the car dealer told him that he was having difficulty exchanging it, a court heard today.
Dan Joe Guerin, who ran a car dealership in Ballincollig and had a garage in Millstreet, told how he had got £200,000 sterling from Ted Cunningham in January 2005 in repayment for a loan that he had given Ted Cunningham for his friend, David O’Sullivan.
Mr Guerin explained that Mr Cunningham had asked for a loan of €120,000 to enable Mr O’Sullivan to buy a share in a sand and gravel pit in Shinrone in Co Offaly in December 2002 and that he would get back €132,000 some 12 months later.
Mr Guerin told Cork Circuit Criminal Court that he gave Mr Cunningham €80,000 in cash and a bank draft for €40,000 in the offices of Mr Cunningham’s company, Chesterton Finance at a meeting attended by Mr Cunningham and Mr O’Sullivan.
He didn’t get a receipt but he did get a fax from the offices of Joseph Colgan solicitors in Dublin confirming the details of the transaction and that he would get 10 per cent interest on his loan of €120,000 and would be repaid €132,000 in December 2003.
He said he looked for his money in December 2003 and Mr Cunningham told him that the pit was going to be sold and that he would get his money then and that continued right through 2004 with Mr Cunningham asking in September or October if he would accept sterling.
“At that stage, I would have taken anything,” said Mr Guerin who confirmed that he got £200,000 sterling from Mr Cunningham roughly in the middle of January 2005 present when he called to Farran and met Mr Cunningham’s son, Timothy who gave him the cash.
He noticed the money consisted of £20 sterling notes and he brought it to his office in Millstreet before giving £10,000 sterling to Con Spillane, the postmaster at Headford Post Office in Co Kerry to change into euro for him and lodging another £5,000 with AIB Bank in Millstreet.
He said he asked Ted Cunningham about changing the money and Mr Cunningham said that Tom Hanlon, whom the court had previously heard was a former Sinn Féin councillor in Passage, would change money for him so he met Mr Hanlon and gave him £75,000 in cash.
Mr Guerin said that when he first asked Mr Cunningham if the money was “ok”, he just laughed and told him it was ok and when he later became concerned it might be from the Northern Bank raid, Mr Cunningham assured him that it wasn’t.
However in early February 2005 after he gave the £75,000 to Mr Hanlon, he told Mr Cunningham he was having difficulty changing the cash and Mr Cunningham told him to “get rid of the remainder of it”, he said.
He told how he then collected some £95,000 sterling from his office in Millstreet, stuffed it into two fertiliser bags and brought it to a stable at his family’s homeplace at Knocknagullane near Rathmore and he later brought gardaí there to recover the cash.
Cross-examined by counsel for Mr Cunningham, Ciaran O Loughlin SC, Mr Guerin admitted that he did lie to gardaí initially and he agreed with Mr O’Louglin that gardaí wanted him to implicate Mr Cunningham in his statement to them.
Mr Cunningham denies 20 charges of money laundering including one of possessing £3,010,380 sterling at Farran between December 20th, 2004 and February 16th, 2005, knowing or believing it to be the proceeds of robbery at the Northern Bank Cash Centre in Belfast.
