The former chief Fianna Fáil fundraiser Des Richardson told the Mahon tribunal yesterday he was given $10,000 cash in an envelope during a lunch in Manchester in April or May 1994. Colm Keenaand Fiona Gartlandreport.
Mr Richardson said he was given the money by an English businessman, Norman Turner, who had invited him to a Manchester United match and with whom he had had a "liquid lunch" in a hotel beforehand.
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who was then minister for finance, was not at the lunch or the match, Mr Richardson said. He said he did not know Mr Turner well, but the English businessman had suggested a trip to a match during a meeting in the Berkeley Court Hotel in Dublin.
During the Manchester lunch, Mr Turner said he wanted to help Mr Richardson in his efforts to clear Fianna Fáil's debts. "He took an envelope from his pocket and he gave it to me and I put it in my pocket. And he said 'that's a confidential contribution and I don't want it recognised'."
Mr Richardson said because of this request for confidentiality he did not lodge the cash to the Fianna Fáil account used for receiving the money he was raising. He kept it in his safe, later converted it into Irish pounds, and spent it on corporate gifts connected to fundraising golf events and the Galway Races, he said.
Tribunal counsel Des O'Neill SC said at the time Mr Turner was "intending to engage in a rather large development" in Dublin and asked if Mr Richardson had felt he should be careful about recording the money in case someone later suggested there was something "untoward" in the payment.
Mr Richardson said once he had informed Fianna Fáil, "that's the end of my job". Asked how he had informed the party, he pointed to mention of the donation in a short memo to Fianna Fáil written some time after June 1994. The memo was discovered to the tribunal along with other documents from Fianna Fáil.
Mr Richardson was also asked yesterday about an internal Ulster Bank memo from 1994 concerning a debt the bank was seeking to have settled. It read in part: "Richardson is adamant that money is in the pipeline and that he has instructed a bank in Manchester to forward them to us." Mr Richardson said the bank memo was mistaken.