Hindsight is supposed to bring 20-20 vision but that the opposite might be the case was suggested by yesterday's proceedings in the Moriarty tribunal.
Mr Christopher Clayton, a senior official who was in charge of raising tax from Mr Charles Haughey in the 1980s, was back in the box yesterday. He acted in relation to the £300,000 non-refundable deposit given by Mr Patrick Gallagher to Mr Haughey in January 1980, as part of a purported land deal.
When raising tax from Mr Haughey on that windfall, Mr Clayton decided there might be a case for raising gift tax from Ms Eimear Haughey (now Mulhern). In the event, gifts she was deemed to have received from her parents were deemed to fall below the value threshold at which gift tax applies.
In March 1989 Mr and Mrs Haughey transferred 227 acres in Abbeville to their four children. This again raised the topic of gift tax. A valuation of the land at £750,000 was suggested but when the Valuation Office investigated the matter, it decided £1.2 million was more realistic. Split four ways that gave Mr Haughey's children land worth £300,000 each. They qualified for agricultural relief on the basis that after receiving the asset, agricultural assets formed more than 75 per cent of each of their total assets. The relief involves a halving of the value of the asset, i.e. £300,000 to £150,000 in each case, or exactly the threshold which existed for gift tax.
Because the earlier benefits which Ms Eimear Haughey had received had to be included when calculating her liability, she therefore breached the threshold and had to pay £41,765 in tax.
What exercised tribunal counsel Mr Jerry Healy greatly yesterday was that when Revenue officials were considering the value of the 227 acres in 1989, they didn't know about the 1980 Gallagher deal, even though a copy of the Gallagher contract was elsewhere on the Revenue files.
The Gallagher deal valued the Kinsealy land at £35,000 an acre. The Valuation Office, in 1989, valued the Kinsealy land at £5,286 an acre, or almost 7 times less. Mr Clayton argued that the Gallagher deal in 1980 might not have influenced the Valuation Office in 1989. It was Mr Clayton who, in the early 1990s, got Mr Haughey to file annual tax returns, which he hadn't filed for years. However the returns do not ask the taxpayer to reveal gifts received, and so Mr Haughey could return the forms without committing the offence of making erroneous returns. The Dunnes payments he had received, and which he knew about at least since 1993, should have been included in separate, gift tax returns. When Mr Dermot Quigley, chairman of the Revenue Commissioners, took the stand in the late afternoon, everything seemed more clear cut. The Revenue had instigated a total review of Mr Haughey's affairs in the wake of the 1997 McCracken Report. It had decided the £1.3 million Mr Haughey received from Mr Ben Dunne merited a gift tax, rather than income tax assessment. There was a problem when the Appeals Commissioners threw out the Revenue's original assessment but the battle was due to resume in the Circuit Court when Mr Haughey agreed to settle. He paid £1,009,435 on August 30th, 2000. (The original assessment was £1.165 million.) The board approved the settlement and Mr Quigley was sure it represented victory. The Haughey inquiry is ongoing.
Mr Quigley is due to resume giving evidence next Tuesday. As was reported in The Irish Times last year, Mr Haughey's family sold 10 acres in Kinsealy to fund his tax settlement. They got £500,000 an acre.