Limo for Kenny and Sargent

Earlier this year the Irish embassy in London decided to invest €26,000 in a people carrier to cut down on limo-hire costs. The man most affected by this is Terry Gallagher whose company, Cartel Direct, earned €580,000 from the embassy since 2003. We ran a story on this a couple of weeks ago.

From the FOI we received and the PQ put in by Leo Varadkar we can see that of the €127,663 spent on limousines during 2007 Cartel was paid €115,642.20.

In 2008 the Irish embassy in London spent a further €101,000 on limos and €99,343.40 of this went to Cartel.

Following on from the mini-van purchase Cartel's earnings from the embassy have dropped from the €100,000 per-year range to just €5,394 so far in 2009.

Unsurprisingly Bertie Ahern, who had reason to be regularly travelling to Britain, and (of course) John O'Donoghue, our now ex-ceann comhairle, were the biggest users of the service.

What was surprising though was the fact that the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) picked up the tab of €2,953.40 for two Enda Kenny car hires. We asked Fine Gael about this and it said it sometimes booked limos through the Irish embassies. The usual practice was for the DFA to bill FG afterwards and FG would settle the bill.

Except this didn't happen for a bill of €2,265 for a three day St Patrick's day trip to London for Kenny in 2006. According to FG Kenny was visiting Irish emigrant groups and a food fare. The DFA, however, said it was never reimbursed. FG say this is because it wasn't billed but it is now in contact with the DFA to sort it out.

Considering that Leo Varadkar, in the IT story, slags the government for "squandering" money and paying "more for less" on limousine hire it's interesting to look at Kenny's unpaid bill.

FG may (eventually) pick up the tab for this but did Kenny really need to have his Mercedes limo on the clock for 33 hours over three days?

A copy of Kenny's 2006 limo bill which came to €2,265 (on 2006 rates) is here.

Fine Gael are not required to repay the other bill which came to €688.44 as Kenny was a guest of Bertie Ahern for the Taoiseach's address to the British houses of parliament.

Trevor Sargent's limo bills for two trips between Heathrow Terminals last November are here and here. As you can see the procedure was to ferry an embassy official out to Heathrow to meet the minister and guide him safely from one VIP lounge to another VIP lounge in a different terminal.

When everyone else was using normal gas guzzlers isn't it great that the DFA made sure Sargent had hybrid and bio-fuel cars to keep his carbon emissions between terminals to minimum? Very green indeed.

But what about the free bus?

ISS on international adoption in Vietnam

Last month Barry Andrews, the Minister for Children, announced that a decision on whether to continue negotiations with Vietnam over a new bi-lateral agreement on intercountry adoption would have to wait until the Irish government considered a new Unicef report.

This report was carried out by the International Social Service (ISS) on behalf of the UN body and a draft report was circulated to certain countries involved in adoption in Vietnam. We reported last August that ISS were critical of Helping Hands, the Cork based adoption agency, because of an alleged lack of transparency in the fees charged to couples. ISS was generally critical of the current Vietnamese system and recommended a suspension of all international adoptions from the Vietnam until 2011.

The report still has not been published by Unicef but prospective parents with plans to adopt from Vietnam are keen to find out what it says.

I may be able to put more up at a later stage but for now here are the "summary of key observations" from ISS. The full draft report is obviously much longer and goes in to more detail but I can't put any more up for the moment.

As it is in "draft" form it obviously may be changed before it's final publication, whenever that may be.

Free lunch

The two senior lawyers in the Moriarty Tribunal earned €2,500 per day up to March 2009 when they were affected by the government's decision to reduce the fees of all professionals contracted to the state by 8%.

We've previously covered how the lawyers were paid this rate, which is more than is paid to lawyers in the Mahon Tribunal, by benefiting from a typo made in the Taoiseach's office.

Freedom of Information documents showed the tribunal lawyers believed they deserved to be paid that rate because of the large amount of work they do and the small size of their legal team compared to other tribunals.

In 2002 the lawyers commissioned Colm McCarthy, whose more recent work includes An Bord Snip Nua's report, to demonstrate how their pay rates hadn't increased in line with the pay of judges and politicians.

As it turns out the lawyers and judge were enjoying another benefit from the state - some €57,000 worth of lunches and coffee since 1997. The claims were approved by the Department of Taoiseach and detailed in 12 years worth of documents released last week.

In contrast to what was allowed for the tribunal I was talking to a public servant today who told me a colleague tried to order a coffee machine for their office recently. A proposal was made but the line-manager refused and pointed out that there was a coffee shop around the corner. Presumably they won't be allowed to charge the state for their Starbucks either.

Maybe there is a special rule that allows tribunal lawyers to charge their coffees and lunches to the state but the Department of Taoiseach wasn't able to confirm this last week.

The FOI documents also revealed that the tribunal paid over €17,000 to Kate MacMillan, an English solicitor. The money was paid in 2007 to MacMillan for her one day of giving evidence on commission in London about her knowledge of the Denis O'Brien and Doncaster Rovers affair.

That's a lot of sandwiches-worth for giving evidence for a few hours.

I'll try an put the FOI documents up online once I have time to get them scanned.

AIB Clifden

As we published yesterday in The Sunday Times AIB was unable to answer any questions about the circumstances of the $60m loan guarantee letter. Instead the bank announced that since we published our first story on BMB and this letter the bank had begun its own investigation in to the matter.

This story came about after we received a letter to The Sunday Times asking us to investigate alleged "shifty dealings" in AIB Clifden. Such tip-offs are always welcome so by all means keep them coming. My email is mark.tighe "at" sunday-times.ie or by post: 4th Floor, Bishop's Square, Redmond's Hill, Dublin 2.

Bankers and Developers

Irish banks have been criticised for being too close to some developers and property investors. I don't know if any banker was as intimately involved with a project as a certain Declan Maher, the manager of AIB's Clifden branch in Co Galway. We covered this story last week.

In 2005 Maher and Kevin Barry, an accountant, were busy looking for investors for a land deal in which the BMB Partnership had invested in near Disney World in Florida. BMB was a partnership involving Barry and Maher.

BMB teamed up with with Buena Vista Corp, an American firm for this project. As well as raising $15m from Irish investors BMB had to ensure it had a bank ready to roll in with another $60m to fund the building of 100 villas known as Gables on the Green.

Which bank did BMB get its $60m letter of guarantee from? Well it was none other than AIB. And AIB Clifden to boot. Maher kindly authored a letter of guarantee for his business partner. See it here.

Maher wouldn't return calls last week. Barry did. He said BMB were not serious about using AIB and there was no conflict of interest for Maher in writing this letter.

I've asked AIB whether it approves of bank managers issuing such letters to their business partners. No answer so far.

Meanwhile the Irish Emerald Gables consortium, which consists of a few of these Philadelphia registered companies, is trying to secure its $15m investment through the Florida courts. The Buena Vista Corp hasn't built any of the promised 100 villas due to a number of issues. Both sides are blaming the other for this. Members of the $15m Irish syndicate include Josie Conneely, a former Fianna Fail councillor, and the late John Cusack, of Cusack Homes.

DO'B and the Tribunal

This post has been in draft form for some time but only getting round to posting it now.

Four weeks ago Denis O'Brien, the media and mobile phone tycoon, held a series of interviews with Sunday newspapers. It was a weird situation knowing this fella was talking to three other papers all coming out on same day. My brief was to make sure I got the best line (news angle) from him. "Don't get scooped," basically.

After a bit of probing early in the interview he told me the 1996 license award had been found to be "illegal" and there were 60 findings against him personally. That stood out to me as the best line anyway. Mark Coughlan had a good look at what the other papers reported.

The tribunal had asked that no one report on its provisional findings "while they remained private" but that moratorium effectively ended when the Mail on Sunday and the Village put some of the key findings out there. Then O'Brien decided to get out some of his own bad press. O'Brien is obviously trying to get his retaliation in first but it's unlikely to change Moriarty's mind. He has something else planned too. You wonder what that could be.

We were going to put the transcript of the whole interview online but by the time the lawyers finished with it there wouldn't have been much left.

The tribunal has not looked kindly on these interviews or our report. It seems to think O'Brien has acted illegally in giving the interviews. More on this to come I'm sure.

IRMS and Bolivia

Recently Jim Farrell, head of IRMS security, gave me a brief interview in Glengad, Co Mayo, where I got a chance to ask him what he knew about so many IRMS staff getting involved in the alleged Evo Morales assassination plot in Bolivia.

Unfortunately he didn't shine too much light on this topic.

Farrell told me that for command and control reasons his staff operated in groups of six. These teams are called Alpha, Bravo etc.

“Close to 100 people lost their job here at the end of last year,” said Farrell. “This is seasonal work. Some fill the gap by going home to see their families in Poland while some do training. Some of Mike’s (Dwyer) group spoke about doing a close-protection course. He was trained as an engineer. So he was more qualified to get other work when that course didn’t work out and he decided to stay (in Bolivia). Who knows what happened then, as we lost all visibility of him when he left us.”

The IRMS boss said it was “unacceptable” that Tibor Revesz, who travelled with Dwyer to Bolivia, had been selling military-like badges commemorating security operations on the Shell project on his personal website. He said Revesz had passed all security and other checks before IRMS employed him. He gave me the impression that Revesz was forced to leave the company over his selling of these badges on his personal website earlier this year. Farrell insisted there was nothing sinister involved.

“We would never allow anyone to wear insignias on the job,” he said. “I think they were trying to create mementos and it was as innocent as that. It was schoolboy stuff but it’s not acceptable.”

There are many unanswered questions about what Dwyer and his friends from IRMS thought they were getting involved with in Bolivia. Edit Toaso, the sister of one of those arrested in the police raid, told me Revesz emailed her to say the group were not in Bolvia to assasinate anyone. There was no cogent explanation of what they were planning though.

She insists the group weren't terrorists but admits she doens't really understand what her brother was doing in Bolivia.

Edit said she was bemused by the portrayal of the Szekler Legion group as right wingers. She said the Legion was more a "survival group" involved in hiking but that explanation doesn't really wash either.

Much has been made of this apparent right-wing link to IRMS by anti-Shell activists. As Michael Clifford in the Sunday Tribune points out much of this is distasteful and jumps to conclusions about Dwyer and others.

Until Revesz or any of the other eastern Europeans involved decide to talk about what they were doing then we are left relying on the Bolivian authorities for any substantial information about their activities South America.