A former senior public servant said he would not have been disposed towards waiving interest on tax due from Dunnes Stores, as was decided upon by the former chairman of the Revenue Commissioners, Séamus Paircéir.
Don Thornhill, a former assistant secretary with the Revenue Commissioners who subsequently became secretary general of the Department of Education and Science, said that on the facts known to him, he would not have waived the interest.
Dr Thornhill was being asked about a decision in 1987 by Mr Paircéir to waive interest of £62,000 arising from an overdue tax bill from the Dunnes Stores trust. Dunnes settled with a payment of £3.56 million.
Dr Thornhill said his view on the waiving of interest by the Revenue would not have been the majority view in the Revenue at the time.
He accepted a point made by Hugh O'Neill SC, for the trust, that the May 1987 payment included an amount of £820,000 that could have been withheld by Dunnes up to July without suffering any penalty. He said Mr Paircéir's decision was "certainly not unreasonable".
Dr Thornhill told Richard Nesbitt SC, for Margaret Heffernan, that he never felt that anyone had interfered with the carrying out of his duties with the Revenue in relation to Dunnes. He said he had never felt anything "untoward" occurred in relation to his involvement in the matters being examined by the tribunal.
The tribunal heard of contacts between the Revenue and Frank Bowen, a member of the Dunnes trust, when the Revenue was seeking to get the trust to pay the agreed bill. At one stage the Revenue was told the cheque needed to be countersigned by Ben Dunne and then that Mr Dunne had gone off on holiday "with the cheque in his back pocket".
Dr Thornhill told Jacqueline O'Brien SC, for the tribunal, that the affairs of Dunnes Stores were handled with particular confidentiality by the Revenue, in the light of the security situation that then existed and the fact that Mr Dunne had some years earlier been kidnapped.
Dr Thornhill said that in the period after Mr Paircéir's retirement from the Revenue in September 1987, he became aware that the former Revenue chairman had taken on "an involvement on the side of the taxpayer".
He had dealings with Mr Paircéir in relation to Dunnes and formed the impression that Mr Paircéir would not be getting involved in negotiations on behalf of Dunnes but was facilitating contact between the two sides.
The Revenue, in seeking to raise discretionary trust tax and capital gains tax, had to value the Dunnes group and Mr Paircéir formed a group within the Revenue in 1986 to work on this issue. Dr Thornhill was part of the group.
He said at one stage they contemplated getting an outside expert to assist and Mr Bowen was informed by Mr Paircéir.
"Mr Bowen raised objections to the idea of using an Irish expert and seemed particularly opposed to anyone from the ICC," according to a Revenue document shown to the tribunal. In the event, the idea "faded away".
A note from Mr Bowen shown to the tribunal stated the profits before tax for 1989 were expected to be £40 million.
