Many of the links between those being mentioned at the Moriarty Tribunal in connection with Celtic Helicopters may be entirely coincidental. However, the number of connections within this very small group is remarkable.
This week it was revealed that a cheque for £10,000 from bloodstock breeder and former senator John Magnier to the then chairman of Aer Lingus, Dr Michael Dargan, ended up forming part of the start-up capital of Celtic Helicopters.
Counsel for the Moriarty Tribunal stressed that the cheque to Dr Dargan "appears to have been a completely legitimate payment arising out of nomination fees." It was one of six cheques which Dr Dargan placed with Guinness & Mahon bank between January and March 1985.
The six cheques ended up in an account in the name of Amiens Securities, controlled by the late Des Traynor. Mr Traynor and Dr Dargan were personal friends and professional associates. Dr Dargan was chairman of Cement Roadstone Holdings from 1973 to 1987 while Mr Traynor was a non-executive director of the same company from 1970 to 1987, when he succeeded Dr Dargan as chairman.
The long association between the two men makes it unremarkable that when Mr Traynor became a senior banker with Guinness & Mahon, Dr Dargan would have availed of banking services Mr Traynor could offer. Thus Dr Dargan had an offshore account with Ansbacher Cayman which Guinness & Mahon opened for him, even though he was a director of Bank of Ireland at the time.
Dr Dargan told the tribunal that the offshore account was used only for the international transfer of funds, and he had no money deposited in it.
However, despite their close association, Dr Dargan says he knew nothing of how £10,000 of his money ended up providing start-up capital for Celtic Helicopters. It was Mr Traynor who ensured this money went to Celtic. "I offered no such instructions," said Dr Dargan.
John Magnier has said this week that he was not an investor in Celtic Helicopters, and had no idea that the cheque he wrote to Dr Dargan would end up where it did. It was therefore another remarkable coincidence that it ended up financing the helicopter firm of the son of the then Taoiseach, to whom he was personally close.
Mr Magnier has received unwanted publicity and been dragged into political controversy before. The Magnier Family Trusts were a beneficial shareholder of United Property Holdings (UPH), a company at the centre of the controversial deals surrounding Telecom Eireann's purchase of its headquarters site in Ballsbridge, Dublin, in 1990.
The company was set up by Mr Dermot Desmond, another man close to Mr Charles Haughey. Dr Michael Smurfit was among the shareholders, and was also chairman of Telecom.
UPH was set up in 1988 and bought the former Johnston Mooney and O'Brien bakery site for £4 million in November 1988. Nine months later it sold it at a profit of £2 million to a complex consortium of offshore companies which, in 1991, sold it to Telecom Eireann for £9.4 million.
Mr John Glackin, a High Court inspector appointed to investigate the affair, later concluded that Mr Desmond controlled these offshore companies and was "financially interested in them."
And another coincidence brings us back to helicopters and a further political controversy.
In 1991 Mr Desmond found himself at the centre of the mystery concerning how documentation relating to the main rival to Celtic Helicopters - the Aer Lingus subsidiary Irish Helicopters - got into the hands of Celtic. The documentation leaked from Mr Desmond's stockbroking firm NCB, although Aer Lingus said it accepted at the time that Mr Desmond had no personal knowledge of or involvement in the affair.
At this time Des Traynor was not only a member of the Aer Lingus board but was also chairman of the board's sub-committee dealing with subsidiary companies, including Irish Helicopters. He held this position from 1982 to 1992.
He was therefore the single most important board member overseeing the running of the Aer Lingus subsidiary, Irish Helicopters, while at the same time he was actively raising substantial funds for its main rival, Celtic Helicopters.
He would have been in a difficult position when the controversy arose over the leaking of documentation relating to Irish Helicopters to Celtic Helicopters. It could not be ascertained yesterday how involved he was in formulating the Aer Lingus board's response to the matter.
Mr Joe Malone was also a member of the Aer Lingus board, although his first term ended in July 1985, the year in which he invested £15,000 in Celtic Helicopters after an invitation from Mr Charles Haughey to do so. He put the investment in his son's name.
The previous year he had turned down an invitation to become chairman of the company on the basis that he was a board member of Aer Lingus. He served again on the Aer Lingus board from August 1991 to December 1993.
Dr Dargan was chief executive of Aer Lingus from 1969 to 1974 and also served on the Aer Lingus board from 1974 to 1986.
The coincidences do not stop there. The same Mr Magnier whose cheque to Dr Dargan ended up with Celtic Helicopters, and who was involved in the Telecom site transactions, was also a beneficiary of the investment in Ireland of Sheikh Khalid Bin Mahfouz.
The Sheikh and 10 associates and family members were granted Irish passports in 1990 in return for a promised £20 million investment. The then minister for justice, Mr Ray Burke, signed the naturalisation certificates in his own home and the then Taoiseach, Mr Haughey, is believed to have personally handed over the passports the following day.
The destination of £17 million of the £20 million Mahfouz investment is known. Some £4 million went to Leisure Holdings, a company which started life in 1988 as Leading Sires with the purpose of investing in bloodstock. The company's major interest at the time was in making investments in Britain.
The largest single shareholder was Mr Magnier, while the chairman was Kerry group chief executive Mr Denis Brosnan. In 1990 it changed its name to Leisure Holdings. Some £4 million of the Sheikh's money went to this company. Coincidentally, £3 million went to Kerry Airport, a project also chaired by Mr Brosnan.
In 1992 Leisure Holdings took over Classic Thoroughbreds, of which Dr Smurfit and Mr Desmond had been directors.
Yet another coincidence is that Mr J.P. McManus, a businessman mainly associated with the horse racing industry, also joined the board of Leisure Holdings. In 1993 Mr McManus was identified by a Government inspector as a key figure in the deals surrounding the Telecom site, as his account in a Jersey bank part-funded and then profited from the series of deals leading up to Telecom's purchase of the site.
Confused? Well, that's not all. Also among the beneficiaries of the Mahfouz investment were businesses in which Mr Pat Butler and Mr Xavier McAuliffe were involved. Both men subsequently invested in an's firm, Celtic Helicopters.
Mr McAuliffe was a minor shareholder in Kerry Airport, which got Mahfouz money. A further £3 million of the Sheikh's funds is believed to have been invested in Butler Engineering, the company of the late Mr Pat Butler.
IN 1985 Mr Traynor sourced £80,000 from several investors, including Mr P.V. Doyle, Mr Seamus Purcell, Mr Joe Malone and Mr Cruse W. Moss. Dr John O'Connell contributed £5,000 at the request of Mr Haughey.
All of these received benefits from decisions taken while Mr Haughey was Taoiseach, as indeed did Mr Magnier through his appointment to the Seanad by Mr Haughey in 1987 and through Mr Haughey's involvement in procuring the Mahfouz investment.
In addition to raising the £80,000 investment in 1985, Mr Traynor secured a loan of £80,000 for the company from Guinness & Mahon.
The second tranche of investors whose names have emerged also all received benefits from decisions taken while Mr Haughey was in Government. These were Mr John Byrne, Mr Xavier McAuliffe, the late Pat Butler of Butler Engineering, Mr Guy Snowden and Mr Michael Murphy. Mr Traynor sought this second group of investors in 1992.
Three weeks ago The Irish Times detailed the various benefits these individuals received from decisions taken while Mr Haughey was Taoiseach.
Mr John Byrne, who invested £47,532, has been a major property developer for some 40 years. Last month we reported that a site he owned in Dublin and another in Tralee had benefited in 1988 and 1990 respectively when they were granted urban renewal designation. Mr Haughey was Taoiseach and Mr Padraig Flynn minister for the environment at the time.
A third site owned by Mr Byrne - on the east side of Parnell Square in Dublin - also received urban renewal designation in 1994. The designations gave attractive tax incentives to development on these sites.
In the late 1970s Mr Haughey travelled to Iraq and in 1983 he travelled to Libya, where he met the Libyan leader, Col Gadafy. On at least one of these occasions he set up an "oil for beef" arrangement whereby Ireland would export beef in exchange for importing oil. Mr Seamus Purcell who, with his brother, operated a major livestock exporting business based in Co Tipperary and Waterford Port, was a beneficiary of the arrangement.
G-Tech, the company run by Guy Snowden who invested £67,000, was awarded the contract in October 1987 to install and operate the on-line system for the Lotto. The multi-million pound contract was renewed in 1993, just months after his decision to invest £67,000 in Celtic Helicopters.
Last year a British jury found that Mr Snowden had tried to bribe businessman Mr Richard Branson to withdraw his rival bid to run Britain's national lottery. G-Tech was also accused of improper lobbying and giving gifts in relation to the Texas Lottery in 1997.
Mr Moss took out a shareholding in Celtic Helicopters in June 1985. General Automotive Corporation - of which he was chairman - benefited from a major contract with CIE. General Automotive and the bus building company Bombardier set up a joint venture in Shannon in the early 1980s and built and sold buses to CIE. General Automotive ultimately took over the entire project, which ceased operation in Ireland in the late 1980s.
It is estimated that CIE spent over £50 million on Bombardier buses, even though they cost more than buses built elsewhere, were unreliable and are all now being replaced.
Mr Joe Malone worked for General Automotive from 1983 to 1988, becoming executive president and president of GAC International.
