Four years after the tribunal started looking into Ray Burke's affairs, the size of the payments he got from Brennan and McGowan continues to astound. And, four years on, we're still learning of new payments from the two builders to their favourite politician.
Yesterday, there was the revelation that they paid Mr Burke £1,000 a month over seven years, from 1975 to 1982. That's a total of £85,000, allegedly Mr Burke's commission for selling houses on behalf of the builders.
Based on previous evidence about his fees, it means Mr Burke sold about 1,700 Brennan and McGowan houses in this period. Yet he was a TD for all this time, a junior minister since 1977 and a full Cabinet minister since 1980.
His estate agency employed only one full-time staff member, a secretary, so it is hard to see how he could manage to show so many houses in his down time from the Dβil.
The other striking thing about yesterday's evidence is the way these round-sum payments, once they ceased in 1982, were followed by large lump-sum payments through offshore companies. In December 1982, Tom Brennan paid Mr Burke £50,000 through a Jersey company. Payments of £60,000 and £15,000, said to be "political donations", followed in 1984 and 1985. So the money kept flowing, even if the route grew more circuitous and the stated purpose had changed.
Curiously, Mr Burke had by then lost interest in his estate agency, in spite of the massive amounts of money it was getting from the two builders. P.J. Burke (Sales) Ltd ceased trading in 1982 without the politician making any effort to sell it. In 1985, he made a settlement with the Revenue Commissioners.
The amounts Mr Burke received 30 years ago still seem large today, but they were colossal then. Mr Burke earned less than £2,000 a year from his Dβil salary when he first became a TD in the 1970s, yet he was getting £1,000 a month from Brennan and McGowan. In 1974, you could buy a house on Dublin 4's Waterloo Road for £14,000; today it would cost several million pounds.
Compare this to the amounts Mr Burke got from the builders: £85,000 in agent's fees, £125,000 in offshore payments plus donations of several thousand at each of the dozen or so elections he fought.
On top of this, Brennan and McGowan claim they remitted £150,000 in proceeds from fund-raising in Britain, though Mr Burke says he never received any money from this source.
Potentially, therefore, he may have received up to £400,000, enough to buy an entire Dublin street at the time.
Yet extracting the full story from him is like drawing teeth. Yesterday, we learned of three new accounts containing £37,000 which he held in the 1970s. We now know that the man who told the Dβil in 1997 he had no overseas bank accounts held accounts in Jersey, the Isle of Man, Manchester, London and Belfast.
As recently as last May, he was misleading the tribunal in relation to the Manchester account and he also failed to disclose a joint account he held with his father in Dublin. His reply in each case is that he failed to recollect the accounts. It is true they were closed over 20 years ago, yet the amounts they held were quite substantial.
There were elaborate regulations governing the transfer of money in and out of the State, yet it is clear Mr Burke flouted these exchange control regulations with impunity. He never applied for permission to move money between his foreign accounts and when he did once apply for permission, he misdescribed his honeymoon as a "business trip".
But then, as he never fails to remind the tribunal, the join between his personal and private lives was always "seamless".