DUBLIN, Ireland — Former Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern received at least $276,000 in secret payments while in office and repeatedly lied about this under oath, a fact-finding judicial investigation ruled Thursday in a long-awaited verdict.
The three judges led by Justice Alan Mahon stopped short of finding Ahern guilty of corruption, because they found no evidence that Ahern gave favors to any of his cash donors when he was finance minister in the 1990s.
The judges did find two other former lawmakers in Ahern’s Fianna Fail party, including former Cabinet minister and European Union commissioner Padraig Flynn, guilty of corruption for soliciting payments from property developers for personal use. They also found 11 past and present members of local councils guilty of the same offense.
While the report itself was a fact-gathering effort and not a direct finding of any criminal wrongdoing, Prime Minister Enda Kenny referred its contents to state prosecutors, the national police force, taxcollection authorities and the Standards in Public Office Commission. Potential offenses include corruption, obstruction of justice and tax evasion.
The report “clearly sets out corrupt practices among a number of politicians,” said Kenny, who declined to say whether he considered Ahern among them.
Kenny said Ahern had stained the integrity of his office by making “a litany of unacceptable statements” to the judges.
Ahern, whose often bizarre and implausible 2007 testimony enraptured the nation, denied doing anything wrong but resigned from office in 2008 after 11 years in power. He was not at his Dublin home Thursday but issued a brief statement saying he was reading the report.
No Irish politicians have been convicted of corruption, only a local government planning official, as a result of the past 15 years of investigations into the bribery culture at the heart of Irish property development.
Prosecutions are hampered, in part, by the fact that the government passed no credible anti-bribery laws until 1996, leaving tax evasion as the only readily proved offense.
Ahern’s longtime accountant and friend, Des Peelo, conceded that Ahern’s testimony had been hard to swallow, but said the judges couldn’t prove Ahern was lying.
“The fact that something is bizarre does not make it untrue. Some aspects of his finances were bizarre,” Peelo said.
Ahern’s former special adviser in government, Gerry Howlin, described the findings as “far worse than anything I expected or believed possible.”
“He told me he was telling the truth,” Howlin said. “His narrative is not believed, and it is damning and it is serious. ... His reputation has been very seriously damaged.”
Several lawmakers in Fianna Fail called on its current leader, Micheal Martin, to expel Ahern from the party as punishment.
Martin called a meeting of party officials to discuss the matter Thursday night.
Voters last year ousted Fianna Fail from power and devastated its parliamentary ranks, a historic defeat driven by Ireland’s negotiation of an international bailout.
Ahern, 60, did not seek reelection.
Interest in the judges’ final 3,211-page report, the product of a 15-year investigation expected to cost taxpayers more than $260 million, was so great that the investigators’ website repeatedly crashed.
“Much of the explanation provided by Mr. Ahern as to the source of the substantial funds identified and inquired into in the course of the tribunal’s public hearings was deemed by the tribunal to be untrue,” the judges found.
They accused Ahern’s government, which founded the original fact-finding tribunal in 1997, of launching “extraordinary and unprecedented” attacks on their work in a bid to stop it once the target of their investigation turned out to be Ahern himself.
The judges said lawmakers must do much more to stamp out corruption in their ranks. They recommended judges receive the power to ban lawmakers from office who are convicted of bribery; tougher laws to protect whistle-blowers; better reporting of politicians’ donations and other gifts, many of which still are kept secret; a new registry for lobbyists and politicians’ contacts with them; and new requirements for lawmakers to disclose all their business interests and potential conflicts of interest.
During his 15 days of testimony in 2007, Ahern admitted keeping most of the money in personal safes at his office and home from 1992 to 1994; failing to keep a personal bank account during much of the time under investigation; and paying no tax on any of it until the investigators uncovered its existence.
Ahern testified that undocumented cash payments he received while in Britain were all unsolicited gifts, while identical payments he received in Ireland were loans.
Under tax law at the time, overseas gifts and domestic loans were not taxable. Ahern made no repayments on the 1993 “loans” until the investigators discovered them in 2007.
He ultimately negotiated a tax settlement for the unearthed funds.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 03/23/2012