09.23.07
Posted in Domestic/Relationships, International Politics at 11:17 am by Sarah
So the spin spews forth. Example such as Brendan O’Connor in today’s SINDO argue that the Ahern is the innocent victim of a pointless witch hunt and that god help the man he was separated and its not fair.
1. Whatever about the Tribunal , the Rev are going to have some fun. The October 31 deadline is coming up for tax returns and I just filed mine. Every single €50 I get for minor radio interviews has to be accounted for. And he’s pissed off cos we’d like to know where he got the £50k in CASH from? My parents were audited in the early nineties, around about the time Bertie was dropping Celia off to the bank with a briefcase full of cash. The taxman went through my mother’s account at the local shop and claimed she couldn’t possibly be feeding her family on the low budget shown in the accounts. She had to explain how she fed us! And Bertie thinks we are supposed to accept he saved 50k in cash? Oh please. So fine, cancel the Tribunal, let the Rev in and publish the settlement in the paper. Hasn’t he already given them some money “on account”? He’ll have to make another lodgement to that account I reckon. He was the Minister for Finance and St. Luke’s was like some medieval counting house (oh ,except of course, they didn’t count, so they don’t know exactly how much they got).
2. Tom Gilmartin says that Eoin O’Callaghan told him he gave Bertie two payments of £50k and £30k. The Tribunal is asking Ahern the source of money,£50k and £30k which were lodged to his accounts. Why is that obscure? Why is that a waste of time? This is what the Tribunal is for. Seems quite logical to me. More logical than someone saving their entire salary ( what was left from the alimony) in cash in a safe over 5 years.
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09.11.07
Posted in Domestic/Relationships, Feminism, International Politics at 8:10 pm by Sarah
A good result for Mr G, but I’m a bit confused…Geoffrey Shannon reckons it doesn’t establish any precedent.
At the Tribunal, Michael Wall gives Ahern £28+ to do up a house that he wasn’t going to buy for another 6 months? Or did I get that wrong? Oh and that “formula” which Ahern’s lawyers says proves it was sterling and not dollars – well they’re still working on that and can’t show it to the bank officials….
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11.26.06
Posted in Feminism, International Politics at 1:40 pm by Sarah
The conventional wisdom says that Denis O’Brien Is a tax-avoiding, politician-bribing, overweight, over-rich bastard with dodgy hair. So when 12 ordinary citizens awarded him €750,000 in damages against the Mirror Group last Thursday, I was absolutely flabbergasted. I never thought he’d get a fair hearing.
By awarding such a large sum of money to a billionaire with a big wad stashed under his mattress, the jury sent a clear message. It wanted to punish a newspaper for printing blatantly defamatory lies and then refusing to apologise. A newspaper that was keeping its fingers crossed that the Joe Soaps on the jury would be sufficiently poisoned by a decade-long nightmare during which O’Brien’s reputation has been almost destroyed.
Fortunately, I was wrong. There are Irish people who believe that just because you’re rich doesn’t mean you’re a crook.
Media caterwauling over the size of the award is in full swing, but the jury’s logic was flawless. To make an impact, the award had to hurt. The Mirror admitted that its original story — claiming O’Brien had bribed Ray Burke to the tune of €30,000 in order to get the licence for 98FM — was wrong. But that didn’t stop its senior counsel dragging the businessman through a litany of unproven allegations that have consumed so much time and about € 100m in costs at the Moriarty tribunal.
Far from damaging him further, all it demonstrated to the jury was that the Mirror hadn’t learnt its lesson. A graceful apology would have been cheaper than using O’Brien as a punch bag.
Everyone brings their own agenda to the O’Brien story. Mine is straightforward: in 1994 O’Brien gave me a job with Esat Telecom. Working for Denis was a crazy experience: his management style swung from tantrum-throwing rows to party-throwing love-ins.
One day you were about to be fired for not addressing a letter correctly, the next he was sending a doctor and a flask of chicken soup round to your house because he’d heard you were sick. It was nerve-wracking, fantastic craic, and a superb education in business management.
With banks threatening to pull the plug, aggressive sales targets to be met, and civil servants to keep happy, it was a high- pressured and crazy environment.
Eventually I couldn’t stick the pressure any more, and when the mobile phone licence was won, I went to work for Esat Digifone, in which O’Brien had no executive role. So no, I didn’t get to cash in.
Instead, I may have to pay the costs in relation to evidence I was required to give to the tribunal. But I don’t begrudge a penny to those who did become millionaires out of Esat when BT bought the business. They worked hard and it paid off.
It’s depressing that some people remain convinced that O’Brien is rich because he was “handed” a licence at the knock-down price of IR£15m. Either he bribed Michael Lowry, the then communications minister, to get it, or he got lucky. I admit I am biased, but I am absolutely convinced Esat won that licence fair and square.
To the “got lucky” brigade I say: many entrepreneurs got rich in the dotcom fever of the 1990s; not many have repeated their success. O’Brien has built companies in both the radio and telecommunications industries all around the world. You can’t dismiss repeated success as luck.
Others complain that having been “given” a licence to print money, O’Brien hot-footed it to Portugal to avoid capital gains tax when he sold off Esat, but this country has lots of tax exiles — Tony O’Reilly, Michael Smurfit and JP McManus among them.
Every accountant in Ireland will advise their clients to get involved in schemes to avoid tax. But only O’Brien seems to be singled out for abuse.
Personally, I think he should pay tax here, but you can’t blame him for feeling disloyal to an exchequer that is funding the inquisition at Dublin Castle. The final bill for that exercise will be a multiple of O’Brien’s tax liability.
As for winning the licence on the basis of a bribe, for that to be true would require a conspiracy worthy of an Oliver Stone movie. Two dozen civil servants have given sworn testimony that Lowry had absolutely nothing to do with the decision to award
Esat Digifone the mobile-phone licence. Michael Andersen, a consultant used by the department, has said that not only was Esat’s bid the best in the competition, it was the best he’d ever seen. Yet the conspiracy theorists insist on propagating bizarre scenarios in which Lowry was of assistance to Esat.
A favourite story goes that the original plan to auction off the mobile-phone licence was going to be disastrous because Esat couldn’t afford the expected price of IR£40m-IR£50m.
A few weeks before the bids were due in, the terms of the competition were changed. Only a fee of IR£15m had to be paid, which gave Esat a chance to compete with big international players such as AT&T, which was also after the licence.
So did Lowry cap the fee in order to help Esat? No. The European Union had just ruled in relation to a row about competition for a second mobile-phone licence in Italy. The EU said it wasn’t fair that the winner had to pay an enormous fee, decided by auction, for its licence, while the incumbent state operator had a free licence. In the interests of fair competition, the state operator would have to pay the same fee as the new entrant.
You can imagine the cursing in Telecom Eireann when that ruling came in. It meant that if the winner of the second mobile- phone licence in Ireland had to pay IR£50m, then Telecom’s mobile wing, Eircell, would have to pay IR£50m too. So the competition was changed from an auction to a capped fee. But that wasn’t to help Esat, it was to help Telecom Eireann.
However, the story that Lowry capped the fee to help O’Brien is sexier and easier to understand than some boring explanation to do with EU competition law, so that’s the one you’ll read about.
I asked O’Brien recently why he continued the legal battle to clear his name. “You’ve all that money; would you not just go home and forget about it?” He didn’t hesitate: “No,” he said. “You have to fight them. You can’t let them get away with this.”
Now that a High Court jury has vindicated him, I have no doubt O’Brien will be spurred on in his fight.
But I fear the court of public opinion will not give him a victory as clear-cut as the one he won last week.
Update: this column was called “courageous” and “excellent” on Marian Finucane’s show this morning. Listen here and fast forward to 1hr22. 
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12.12.05
Posted in Domestic/Relationships, International Politics at 5:34 pm by Sarah
Ha!
“Pressure is building on Minister for Justice Michael McDowell after he admitted today he had passed a Garda document to a national newspaper. The document related to the executive director of the Centre for Public Inquiry (CPI), Mr Frank Connolly, who Mr McDowell says was involved in a plot to train Colombian rebels in the use of explosives.
Mr McDowell used Dáil privilege to allege that Mr Connolly also travelled to Colombia in 2001 using a forged passport.
…….The Minister appeared on radio this lunchtime to defend his position and revealed he had given the Irish Independent documents he says prove the Mr Connolly had made a “bogus application” for a passport.
…..He maintained that his statement about Mr Connolly in the Dáil was “the unvarnished truth” and said the Official Secrets Act provided for a Minister to make official information available to the media in the public interest.
“It is not a concern of mine that the matter appeared in the Irish Independent because I supplied it to the Irish Independent . . . I provided that document to the Irish Independent.”
“I did it for a particular reason and that was because on a previous RTE programme … remarks had been made which suggested that there was no truth whatsoever in these questions that were being raised about Mr Connolly.”
He said the information was not provided to “get at” the former journalist but acknowledged that his discussions earlier this year with the billionaire who funded the CPI, Chuck Feeney, had influenced the decision to withdraw the centre’s funding.
…Labour’s Joe Costello accused Mr McDowell of “abusing his position” and said today’s revelation justified his party’s opposition to the Garda Bill passed in the Oireachtas in June.
The Garda were the object of the Minister’s ire in 2003 when Mr McDowell’s it was leaked that his son was attacked outside the family home in south Dublin. The garda posted at the house was dismissed soon after and Mr McDowell’s wife, Prof Niamh Brennan, said she would not report an assault because it would appear in the press. The comments attracted much criticism.
The Garda Bill was being drawn up at the time and amendments were made to provide for prison sentences of up to 5-years for gardai found passing information or files to journalists or other parties.
In a further amendment, Minster McDowell accorded his position the power to demand Garda files and increased the threat of prosecution for journalists protecting confidential sources.
The Minister said at the time the amendments were not connected to his personal experience.”
Now hello Michael? There are many differences between my little leaking crime and your’s.
I leaked a document which contained the completely truthful and uncontested fact that you had received a donation of €15k from Denis O’Brien. This donation was neither illegal or unethical. I leaked said document because the Tribunal was completely focusing on donations made to Fine Gael, even though those donations were sometimes overshadowed by donations to the PDs and Fianna Fail. I thought that the people had the right to contextualise all those donations. If the Tribunal had its way, the donations to other parties would never be mentioned and the people would think that Denis O’Brien never gave a penny to anyone except Fine Gael. For this act, I may well yet have to fork out a 5 figure sum in costs.
Yet YOU YOU leak a document which you claim is evidence, yet it is not evidence enough to arrest the man. YOU leak a document which alleges a completely illegal act. YOU talk to the guy’s boss and have his career destroyed. YOU do this because you are pissed off the official system won’t allow ALL the facts the come out. But of course, its ok for you to do that. But not me.
We’ll see where this gets you. The LEAST you could do is call your dogs at Dublin Castle off me.
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