Mr Ben Dunne admitted yesterday it was extraordinary he had no recollection of making payments of more than £1 million over and above what he originally intended paying to the former Taoiseach, Mr Charles Haughey, bringing his total payments to the politician to £2 million.
Half of these payments were disclosed to the earlier McCracken tribunal but Mr Dunne said he had no recollection of any payments not mentioned to that inquiry.
Counsel for the Moriarty tribunal, Mr John Coughlan SC, asked Mr Dunne what would his comment be if a member of the public were to express surprise that he had no recollection of these payments.
"I think that's a fair comment but it's not hard to believe," Mr Dunne said adding that at the time he was controller of the Dunnes Stores group and handled a weekly turnover of between £10 million and £12 million.
Mr Dunne said he had agreed to pay Mr Haughey between £700,000 and £900,000.
Mr Coughlan put it to him that if he ended up paying twice that amount to Mr Haughey, he would have known about it. Mr Dunne insisted he didn't but agreed it was, and still is, "an awful amount of money".
He was questioned about a specific payment of £200,000 sterling in 1990 to the former Taoiseach. The money came from the profits of a company in Hong Kong known as Wytrex, which sourced between 2 and 5 per cent of all Dunnes Stores textiles in the Far East.
The money was channelled through the Bank of America at Camden Street, London, and Ansbacher Cayman Ltd, and ended up in the Guinness and Mahon bank in Dublin.
Mr Dunne said the first time he became aware of the payment was in September 1999 when the tribunal contacted him. He had no recollection of initiating the payment or of dealings with the Bank of America but accepted he would have had to authorise the payment.
He could not recall who gave him details of the account in Dublin into which the funds should be deposited but assumed it would have been Mr Noel Fox, former financial adviser to the Dunnes Stores group.
After he was contacted by the tribunal last year he endeavoured to obtain details of the Wytrex payment from the man who set up the company in the mid-1980s, Mr Laurence Tse, but Mr Tse said he had no records or recollection of the payment and the company had been liquidated some years ago.
Mr Dunne added that to the best of his knowledge no other payments were made from Wytrex to Mr Haughey but if new information surfaced he would co-operate with the tribunal.
