The amount of money which Mr Charles Haughey had sought to clear his debts was considerably more than Mr Ben Dunne had within his personal finances, the Moriarty tribunal heard yesterday.
Mr Dunne said in 1987, when the first payment to the former Taoiseach was made, "I certainly hadn't anything like £700,000 worth of liquid funds to my name".
On his second day dealing with the payment of a £282,500 sterling cheque to Mr Haughey through a company called Tripleplan Ltd, Mr Dunne reiterated that the payment had been made on behalf of Dunnes Stores rather than himself.
Meanwhile, the tribunal was told that Mr Haughey has now accepted that he was the beneficiary of the cheque, drawn on May 20th 1987. Mr Eoin McGonigal, counsel for Mr Haughey, said the former Taoiseach "has seen the evidence and accepts on the basis of the evidence that he got the benefit of the £282,500".
Mr Dunne described the sum, paid through Dunnes Stores in Bangor, Co Down, as considerable. When Mr Noel Fox approached him with the request for funds from Mr Des Traynor, Mr Haughey's personal financial adviser, there was "never any doubt in my mind" it would come from "Dunnes Stores-generated funds". He could have funded the payment personally "if I was to run up a debt".
As Oliver Freaney & Co took care of his personal accounts, Mr Dunne said he would have thought Mr Fox was aware he could not fund the payment himself.
On Tuesday, Mr Fox, a partner with Oliver Freaney & Co, told the tribunal he believed Mr Dunne would "personally look after these payments" to Mr Haughey. However, Mr Dunne said: "Mr Fox would have known what I meant by saying, `look, it will take me six or seven months and I'll be able to arrange the funds' and I certainly didn't think he thought that I was arranging the funds through my own situation by contacting a banker.
"I also believe that he would have known that I didn't have £700,000 to £900,000 worth of liquid assets to my name. I might have had assets but not liquid assets."
He said while he had no recollection of the Tripleplan cheque, he has always had a clear recollection of a cheque paid later in 1987 to the Cayman banker Mr John Furze. Of the latter, he said: "It was a hot cheque. It's like stolen merchandise."
He said he "definitely" discussed both cheques in the period 1988 to 1990 with Mr Kevin Drumgoole, who was carrying out an audit of Dunnes accounts. He agreed one of the reasons he did not offer any information on the cheques was because they were company payments, rather than his own. Another reason was because he felt he had a duty to Mr Haughey to keep them confidential.
"I had two situations that I can recall when I wanted to keep things confidential. One was my kidnapping . . . the other was payments to Mr Haughey."
He said he deflected all queries to Mr Fox, explaining: "Kevin Drumgoole was the audit manager so it wasn't a question that he would put pressure on me. It was more that you just want to avoid being asked the question. I said `Noel, you deal with that' . . . that's how I remember it because it was a hot or an explosive issue."
In relation to the payments, Mr Dunne recalled making a decision to draw the money from Dunne Stores' Northern branch as it would have been "handled on very few occasions".
"It would have been easier to trace, in my opinion, if the payment had been paid down South. And what I mean by being traced is by people within the business."
He accepted that the McCracken tribunal had uncovered payments consistent with the amount of money requested by Mr Haughey and that the Tripleplan payment was in excess of that total of £700,000 to £900,000.
However, he did not believe two separate approaches for money had been made. "I firmly believe I could not forget an approach on such a hot topic . . . I firmly believe I got one approach."
Mr Dunne said he could recall Mr Fox approaching him following an 8 a.m. Dunnes Stores board meeting in Dublin. Such meetings used to take place on a daily basis and normally both men attended.
Mr Dunne recalled Mr Haughey became Taoiseach in March 1987, but said this was of no assistance to helping him remember exactly when Mr Traynor first approached Mr Fox. The McCracken tribunal concluded the first approach was made in autumn 1987, but Mr Dunne accepted it must have been earlier than that.
On Tuesday, Mr Dunne said there was nothing significant which occurred within Dunnes Stores in 1987 other than the opening of a new store. However, on reading an article in The Irish Times yesterday, he said he recalled "there was things happened in the trust in around that time".
The article had referred to evidence given at the McCracken tribunal that, in 1988, the Appeal Commissioners found in favour of the Dunnes trustees in relation to a tax assessment. It is believed the assessment was raised some time in 1987.
