Businessman furious FF got only £10,000

One of the Fitzwilton representatives who handed over the £30,000 cheque to Mr Ray Burke has said he was angered when he discovered that only £10,000 had been passed on to Fianna Fail.

Mr Paul Power, a director of Fitzwilton, told The Irish Times yesterday that he had presumed "90 per cent plus" would be passed on to party headquarters and he had only learned in March or April of this year that just £10,000 had been passed on. He said: "I was bloody annoyed about it, I can tell you."

Mr Power said he had been "absolutely flabbergasted" to learn that an anonymous letter had been sent to politicians alleging that the money had been asked for by Mr Burke when he himself, Mr Robin Rennicks and another executive of Fitzwilton, Mr Ray McKenna, now deceased, had met Mr Burke to discuss an application for IDA assistance for a Fitzwilton company, Rennicks Ltd. "No such meeting ever took place", Mr Power said.

"I cannot imagine how anyone would be bad enough to circulate that note", he continued. "I have no idea who might have known of the meeting."

Mr Power said he wished to emphatically deny that he had ever had a meeting with Mr Burke at which government grants to his or any company were mentioned.

The only meeting he ever had with Mr Burke was the June 1989 one at which he and Mr Rennicks handed over the £30,000 cheque. "It only lasted six or seven or eight minutes. He asked for it to be made out to cash." There was "nothing asked for and nothing offered" in return for the cheque, he said.

The meeting took place in Mr Burke's home in Swords and the only persons present were Mr Burke, Mr Power and Mr Rennicks. Mr Power said the amount to be donated was decided before the meeting and he and Mr Rennicks "asked if it should be made out to head office or some account". Mr Burke "asked for it to be made out to cash, to facilitate some going to the local constituency".

"He said he had a few local constituency expenses and the impression was that it was a couple or three grand that was going down that channel, with the rest going to the party."

Asked if he and Mr Rennicks felt uncomfortable about having made out the cheque to cash, Mr Power said they were "not particularly unhappy at the time". He added: "If we had hindsight, we would all be multi-millionaires."

Asked why the donation had been given to Mr Burke, Mr Power said this had been decided by someone in Fitzwilton. He and Mr Rennicks had been asked to deliver it as their two businesses were in Artane, Dublin, and Mulhudddart, north Co Dublin.

He did not know the details, but he believed the company had been contacted by someone in Fianna Fail who had solicited a donation.

According to a Fitzwilton source last night, the person who received the call was the late Mr McKenna, who was then the Fitzwilton finance director. It was not known if it was Mr Burke who had contacted Mr McKenna, according to the source. Mr McKenna had decided that the £30,000 payment should be made to Fianna Fail through Mr Burke, and he had full authority to make that decision.

Mr Power, when asked what they had talked about with Mr Burke, said: "We said `how's it going, how is the election coming along?' We might have told him that Robin was out to one side of him and I was out to the other." There had never been "any talk of grants or anything like that".

He said he had applied for grants for his company over the years and had received some, but they would not be as big as those which had been received by Rennicks Ltd. He could not remember if he had any application in at the time of the meeting with Mr Burke. "But it would not have been big, if it was. £30,000 would have been a significant percentage of whatever we were looking for."

At the time of the donation Fitzwilton had an annual turnover of £400 million and £30,000 would not have been very much money, Mr Power said. "It might have been big for Ray Burke, but it wasn't intended for him."

Novum is no longer owned by Fitzwilton, but Mr Power remains on the board. He said that the handing of the cheque to Mr Burke was the only political donation he had ever been involved with. He added: "You can imagine what I would say to someone if they asked me now."