Mr Ron Woss, a well known Australian businessman has been linked to the Ansbacher accounts. Mr Woss, who is the chairman and major shareholder of a quoted Australian technology company, Tennyson Holdings, used an Ansbacher account to organise the buying and selling of shares in Australian companies up until the establishment of the McCracken tribunal in 1997.
It is understood that the Australian embassy in Dublin has passed on information concerning Mr Woss and his connection with Ansbacher to the relevant authorities in Australia.
Mr Woss is well known in Perth business circles and has previously faced charges in connection with tax evasion in Australia. He is the second significant business figure from Western Australia to be linked with the secretive Ansbacher accounts. It is also known that the disgraced former premier of Western Australia Mr Brian Burke, had financial dealings with the late Mr Des Traynor, the banker and friend of Mr Charles Haughey who ran the secretive accounts.
Mr Woss was investigated and charged by the Australian tax authorities in connection with a "bottom of the harbour" scheme. These were popular in Australia during the early '80s and involved the owners of companies facing large tax bills selling the company to intermediaries who then destroyed the company records making it impossible for the tax to be collected.
In some cases they were scattered at the bottom of Sydney Harbour - hence the name given to the schemes.
Mr Woss, who was cleared of the charges, was not available for comment.
The Moriarty tribunal has been told that an account with Ansbacher called Diamond Trust A/A26 was used to buy and sell shares in Australia.
Instructions in relation to the account came from Mr Woss and also from the late Mr John Furze, the Cayman Island banker who looked after the Caribbean end of the Ansbacher operation.
Mr Samuel Field Corbett, of Management Investment Services, Dublin, looked after the Diamond Trust account on a day-to-day basis following the death of Mr Traynor in 1994. Instructions would come a few times a week and mainly involved the transfer of funds to Australia. The account became dormant once the McCracken tribunal started to investigate the clandestine deposits run by Mr Traynor.
Mr Woss would make a couple of trips a year to Ireland in connection with the account and his other business interests. He is the director of a UK registered company called Tepbrook Properties which invested in a shopping centre in the London suburb of Cricklewood. Mr Field Corbett is also listed as a director. The most recent set of accounts for the company show that it had tangible assets of more than £8 million sterling and retained earnings of £807,251 in 1998. Tepbrook is in turn owned by Danstar Holdings Pty Ltd, an Australian registered company with the same West Perth address as Tennyson Holdings, the publicly quoted technology company.
Public records in Australia show that Mr Woss is a director of Danstar and that its two issued Aus $1 shares are owned by the late Mr Furze and Mr John Collins. Mr Furze and Mr Collins were Cayman Islands based bankers who worked with Mr Traynor in establishing and developing the whole Ansbacher deposit operation.
An Australian credit rating company which contacted Mr Woss about Danstar on behalf of The Irish Times, was told Danstar commenced operations in December 1991. Mr Woss confirmed that Mr Furze and Mr Collins were involved with the company and that Danstar operated as a trustee, but would not disclose the nature of the trust structure or the identity of the trust for which Danstar acts.
Connections between Ansbacher and one of Australia's largest political scandals have already come to light.
In 1991 the Western Australian Crown Solicitors Office investigated a payment of £91,000 sterling to a Mr Laurie Connell from Ansbacher Ltd. Rothwells, a merchant bank run by Mr Connell, had collapsed in 1988 and a subsequent investigation revealed corrupt links between the government of Western Australia, led by Mr Burke, and prominent businessmen. The subsequent Royal Commission into "WA Inc" as it became known, looked into a number of deals entered into by the government. They included the purchase by the state in 1983 of a company called Northern Mining, then owned by Alan Bond, the Australian entrepreneur. Northern Mining's main asset was a 5 per cent stake in the Argyle Mine, the largest diamond prospect in the world. It was alleged that the state paid A$15 million over the odds for the stake by buying Northern Mining in a deal put together by Mr Connell.
The stake was bought by Western Australia Diamond Trust, a semi-state company. It is not clear if the Diamond Trust account in Ansbacher was linked to the deal but it is understood that substantial amounts of money passed back and forth from the account to Australia, via Dublin.
Mr Burke resigned as premier in 1988 and was appointed Australian envoy to Ireland and the Vatican. While in Ireland he was given what he said was a £200,000 interest free loan by Mr Traynor which was used for the purchase of property, silver, crystal and cars.
The Royal Commission investigated the loan but did not draw any conclusions in its 1992 report, saying it had been unable to interview Mr Traynor.
