Former minister for justice Ray Burke was jailed for tax offences this week, but he leaves a trail of unanswered questions in his wake, argues Paul Cullen
The planning tribunal investigated him for years, the Criminal Assets Bureau raided his house, the Revenue Commissioners made a €600,000 settlement with him and he's now in jail. Yet when it comes to Ray Burke and his dark secrets, we may only have scratched the surface.
The irony is that, for all the time he has spent in the public glare over recent years, only a fraction of the decisions Burke took during his lengthy political career have undergone thorough public scrutiny.
The tribunal spent five years investigating two specific payments made to the former minister, as well as a 20-year financial relationship with his major supporters, builders Brennan and McGowan.
But large swathes of his career, particularly the early days when he was a dominant figure on Dublin County Council, have never been the subject of detailed public hearings. Decisions he made as a minister in various portfolios have also attracted controversy, but few have been the subject of detailed investigation.
At this late stage, these matters may never be investigated. Many of the controversies date back several decades, so any relevant documents or records would be scarce. Some of the main figures involved have passed on.
The law of diminishing returns may apply.
The tribunal is the logical place for further investigation of Ray Burke. However, it plans to pull down the shutters in another two years, and already has a full workload unrelated to the former minister. Justifiably, too, the lawyers may feel they have had their fill of "Rambo".
As for the Criminal Assets Bureau, it also seems to have finished with Burke. He has made a substantial settlement with the Revenue and is now tax compliant. CAB's prosecution was taken for tax offences, rather than the corrupt payments identified by the tribunal.
Indeed, there seems to be no enthusiasm in the DPP's office for prosecuting anyone for corruption until more stringent legislation is introduced. The case of George Redmond, whose conviction on corruption charges was quashed last year, has only served to confirm this view.
But before we consign Burke completely to the dark and dusty past it's worth taking another look at some of the controversies that have raged about the man from Swords and which have been overshadowed by subsequent events.
Dublin County Council
For years, Ray Burke was Mr Big on Dublin County Council. He wore dark glasses and a showband suit, and his bullying manner quickly put manners on fellow councillors.
As an estate agent, he sold houses on commission for the very builders who were benefiting from the rezonings passed by the councillors at their monthly meetings. For Brennan and McGowan alone, he sold 1,700 houses in the 1970s and 1980s, according to the builders.
This dubious situation was summed up in a Sunday Independent headline in 1974, which read "Conflict of interests on council". The journalist who wrote the article, Joe McAnthony, had uncovered a document which showed a £15,000 payment to Burke by one of Brennan and McGowan's companies.
Three years earlier, Burke had co-sponsored a motion to rezone land at Mountgorry, north Dublin, on which the two builders had an option. The £15,000 represented his share of the proceeds when the land was eventually sold.
The Garda investigated, the usual denials were issued and nothing happened. Instead of winning an award for his investigative work, McAnthony was sidelined at his newspaper and he decided to emigrate with his family.
Speaking this week from his home in Canada, McAnthony identified this controversy as a watershed. He had thought Burke would go to jail, he told Newstalk FM. Instead Burke was exonerated and "the floodgates opened".
Thereafter, the councillors seemed impervious to criticism. Each month, the small public gallery filled up with property developers, landowners and their agents waiting for rezoning decisions, with the celebrations spilling out into Conways pub nearby.
Brennan and McGowan were interviewed again about allegations surrounding the rezoning of land at Fortunestown, near Tallaght. This came after Dublin Corporation's plans to acquire 700 acres in the area by compulsory purchase order had been resisted by a consortium of six landowners, including the two builders. Burke, who said there was "absolutely nothing improper" about the episode, supported the developers' proposals because they were "in line with Fianna Fáil policies of promoting free enterprise".
When he became minister for environment, Burke appointed known party supporters to An Bord Pleanála and the controversy over planning raged even wider. Builders were in a "win-win" situation, where a refusal of planning permission could result in a hefty compensation claim.
When the board refused permission for a scheme at Fortunestown, for example, the authorities were left exposed to a £2 million compensation claim from a company involving Tom Brennan.
Even Burke was moved to complain about the "excessive rezoning decisions" of the council in the early 1980s, but he did nothing to curb their activities.
In 1989, Burke was again investigated as part of another largely fruitless Garda investigation. A local authority official told detectives the Fine Gael TD Nora Owen had told him Burke received £5,000 for his help in obtaining planning permission for a fuel yard in north Dublin.
Owen told gardaí the source of this information was another Fine Gael TD, Michael Noonan. They asked her to set up a meeting with Noonan but this didn't happen.
Burke had made representations on behalf of the party supporter who owned the yard, which was on the main Belfast road. However, gardaí concluded there was "no foundation" to the allegation.
The Plantation was a tree-filled oasis in the heart of Georgian Dublin, on Herbert Street. The Pembroke Estate, which owned it, applied for planning permission to develop the site on many occasions, but without success.
Auctioneer John Finnegan, a director of the estate, then introduced builders Brennan and McGowan to the property. They bought it through a £2 subsidiary company, Criteria Developments, for £40,000 in 1979.
Criteria applied for planning permission for offices and apartments, but this was refused on multiple grounds. The company appealed to An Bord Pleanála, which overturned the original decision in March 1984.
In the same month, Burke set up an offshore company in Jersey. A company, Caviar Ltd, was set up in the name of "P.D. Burke", using a false address. A fortnight later, £35,000 was deposited to Caviar's bank account.
The Flood tribunal report in 2002 was unable to identify the source of this money but rejected as "not credible" Burke's explanation that the money was a re-lodgement of money from an Isle of Man account.
Criteria sold the site to Green Property in 1986 for £261,000 and it was later built upon. A dispute broke out between Brennan and McGowan and Finnegan over the shareout of the £150,000 profit. Finnegan sought £50,000 but settled for £20,000, even though he hadn't invested any money in the deal.
Rennicks
It sticks out like a sore thumb, the only known payment Ray Burke got in May/June 1989 that hasn't been investigated by the tribunal. It is five years now since lawyers at the inquiry said the £30,000 payment by Rennicks Manufacturing to Burke would be the subject of public hearings, but nothing has been heard about it since. Now, with the tribunal likely to wind up within two years, it's looking probable that no public examination of this payment will be held.
It was June 7th, 1989, a week before a general election, when Robin Rennicks and another businessman, Paul Power, travelled to Burke's home in Swords to make the payment. Rennicks was a director of Fitzwilton, to which he had recently sold his signmaking company, Rennicks Manufacturing.
At a short meeting in Burke's home at the time, Briargate, the two men handed over a £30,000 cheque, made out to cash, on behalf of Fitzwilton. Burke later passed on £10,000 of this money to Fianna Fáil, but kept the rest for his own purposes.
Fitzwilton, which was controlled by newspaper magnate Sir Tony O'Reilly, was a regular donor to political parties, but this contribution marked a major departure from established practice. Normally, the company gave its money to Fianna Fáil headquarters, through an established conduit. This was the first time money was not given to the party's election fund, and the first time it was paid through a minister. It was unusual, too, that the cheque was made out to cash.
Burke told the Dáil in September 1997 that £30,000 was the "largest single contribution" he had received during an election campaign. It was only in the following year, after he had resigned, that it emerged that there were two such payments, from Rennicks and JMSE.
As minister for communications, Burke was responsible for issuing licences for the operation of the MMDS television transmitter system. Of the 29 licences granted in 1989, a majority went to companies linked to O'Reilly.
The licencees were supposed to have a legal monopoly on television signals but illegal operators spoilt this in many areas of the State. Burke promised, in a letter to the O'Reilly interests, to apply "the full rigours of the law" to illegal operators, but no action was taken against the illegal operators for many years after.
Oil
As minister for energy in 1987, Burke significantly eased the terms for oil companies prospecting off the Irish coast. Royalties were abolished and the State relinquished any stake in an eventual oil or gas find.
His move effectively reversed the terms introduced by the Labour energy minister, Justin Keating, in 1975, which had given the State the right to take a stake of up to 50 per cent in any discovery, and also allowed for the payment of royalties. The former Labour leader, Dick Spring, amended these terms in 1985 and 1986.
Early hopes of an oil rush that would ease the country's economic woes were dashed. By the time Burke became minister, the only discoveries were a "small marginal" oil field off Waterford and a "possible" gas field off the coast of Cork. Some 98 wells had been drilled and £400 million spent by the exploration companies.
Burke was his usual trenchant self in fending off criticism of the change. "I am realistic enough to appreciate that we cannot have our cake and eat it," he said on September 30th, 1987, when announcing new licensing terms for the offshore sector.
"Perhaps when we are a recognised oil province, we will be able to afford the luxury of more stringent terms, but for now it is clear that concessions of a radical nature are necessary to offset to the greatest possible extent the effects of low oil prices on exploration in Ireland and the recent disappointing results." The thinking was that the oil multinationals would be more eager to prospect in Irish waters if they were promised a larger slice in the profits. The State would then take its cut in the form of taxation. The terms were similar to those in Britain and Spain, according to the minister.
However, Burke's decision was something of a solo run and followed a meeting with the oil companies that took place contrary to the advice of a senior adviser in his department.
SIPTU's national exploration committee has claimed the changes "totally distorted" the balance in favour of the oil companies. It wants the Mahon tribunal to investigate the matter and says all licences issued from 1987 on should be frozen in the national interest if any undue influence is proven.
In any event, the hoped-for manna did not fall. The new terms dictated by Burke failed to produce an oil rush and no substantial deposits were found.
Passports
The passports affair in 1997 was the scandal that led to Burke's resignation, but in many ways it was simply "the straw that broke the camel's back".
The then minister for foreign affairs spent most of that summer fighting the rising tide of allegations over the £30,000 he got from JMSE in 1989. He seemed to have survived that crisis, only to succumb to one final controversy that erupted with a report in The Irish Times in October that year.
The scandal dated back to December 8th, 1990, when Burke, as minister for justice, signed certificates of naturalisation for 11 people - eight Saudi Arabians and three Pakistanis - in his home in Swords. On the following day, the man for whom the passports were intended, Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, the owner of Saudi Arabia's only private bank and one of the kingdom's wealthiest men, received them personally over lunch in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin. It is believed they were handed over by the then taoiseach, Charles Haughey.
The passports were given as part of the passports-for-investment scheme, in return for a promised £20 million sterling investment programme in Ireland by the sheikh.
While Burke refused to meet representatives of the sheikh, in other respects the would-be Irish citizens got very special treatment. In breach of statutory regulations, the passports were issued on the day before naturalisation certificates were signed. Other standard procedures, including the need to swear fidelity to the State, the payment of fees and the requirement that applicants be resident in the State for about 60 days, were put to one side.
In addition, the passports were issued before the investment was in situ, as was normally required. It was normal, too, for naturalisation certificates to be signed by a senior official, rather than the minister.
Four years later, questions were raised about the scheme when Sheikh Mahfouz became embroiled in the giant BCCI banking scandal. The new minister for justice, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, recorded her alarm at what happened. She described the details as "highly unusual to say the least" and said the information provided about the promised investment was "extraordinarily scanty by any standards". The certificates of naturalisation for the 11 individuals should be revoked, she said.
However, the government changed and while an internal report later highlighted a series of "errors and discrepancies" in the matter, no further action was taken.
In 2002, the Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, said Geoghegan-Quinn had shown him the file and it "didn't raise any alarm bells". The file had been sent to the tribunal, he said.
Meanwhile, it was reported that half the promised £20 million sterling investment could not be traced.
Last year, the Government announced it planned to outlaw the passports-for-sale scheme.