Meat exporter used Ansbacher account to pay secret commissions

The meat exporter Mr Seamus Purcell used the Ansbacher deposits to pay substantial secret commissions to people he dealt with in the Middle East.

A dollar account was opened offshore for him by the late Mr Des Traynor, Mr Purcell told the High Court inspectors who investigated the deposits. On occasions, Mr Purcell and a Middle Eastern contact collected large amounts of dollars in cash in Guinness & Mahon Bank, Dublin.

Mr Purcell told the inspectors the payments were "secret commissions" that were paid independently of the contract they were related to.

"I went down [to Guinness & Mahon\] and got cash for $30,000 and I went down and got cash for maybe $50,000 and I handled it all myself," Mr Purcell told the inspectors. He was accompanied at the time by the man who was to receive the commissions. "He was from the Middle East."

An account was opened in Guinness Mahon Cayman Trust (later Ansbacher Cayman) for Mr Purcell in the early 1980s after he had asked Mr Traynor if he could open a dollar account for him. Mr Traynor said he could but that it would have to be abroad.

Mr Purcell said he needed the account to pay commissions. "In those countries at the time, in Egypt and those places, you had to have an agent... and that agent would get maybe 2 per cent or 3 per cent commission.

"In the days when I am telling you about, that I would go to G&M myself, in 1982, I didn't want anybody else knowing about those people being given commissions... if you understand me."

He said that at other times the commissions were not secret.

Mr Purcell had been owed money for cattle he'd shipped to the Canary Islands. He gave a cheque for $432,438 (€440,432) from that Canary Island deal to Mr Traynor and it was used to open the dollar account. A further $1 million was then loaned to the account. At the time he needed $1.5 million to pay a number of commissions.

Mr Purcell said he could not say how much he paid in commissions over the years. He was asked if the amount was "$1 million a year or $5 million a year?"

"It is a very difficult question to answer at this stage because I would have to look at the sums and the monies and everything else coming out and take a percentage off that." It is not clear from the interview if, or how, further amounts were lodged to the Ansbacher account. Mr Purcell said he stopped using the account in the mid-1980s.

At another point in his interview with the inspectors, the transcript of which is contained in the appendices to their report, Mr Purcell said of doing business in Egypt and the Middle East: "You give $100,000 here and $20,000 there to some of the people who would help you inside the company."

Mr Purcell said Mr Traynor played a key role in his being able to carry out his overall business. "I trusted Mr Traynor with everything and as far as I was concerned he was the best banker I ever met in my life."

During his interview with the inspectors Mr Purcell gave an overview of his career. He said he started working with his father in 1937, selling cattle and sheep in Ireland. He started on his own six years later.

In 1950 he began exporting to England. In 1960/1970 he began exporting to the Caribbean, Portugal and the Middle East. In one year in the early 1980s, he shipped 317,00 cattle from Ireland, he said.

He bought meat factories in the 1980s and at one stage was killing 10,000 cattle a week. "We shipped every bit of that. We never put one bit of meat into intervention." Later in the 1980s he ran into severe financial problems. He owed banks €49 million and was able to repay them by selling assets.

He gave the business to his sons in 1991, and now works for them. Mr Purcell said one Egyptian contact had once said he had spent $270 million buying from Mr Purcell. Mr Purcell told the inspectors he was not giving evidence to them voluntarily and was doing so under protest.