During the 1989 general election campaign the then financial controller of Fianna Fail, Mr Sean Fleming, received an unprecedented request from the then taoiseach, Mr Charles Haughey. Mr Haughey asked that a receipt for a large donation which he was delivering to Mr Fleming should be sent to his office, rather than directly to the donor. Mr Fleming complied.
During the fund-raising drive surrounding that campaign, 900 contributions were recorded by Mr Fleming. Each contribution was noted in a cash receipts book and a receipt was issued. The carbon copies of the receipts were then used to keep a record. On 19 occasions Mr Haughey asked Mr Fleming to send receipts to his office. Some of these were for some of the largest donations received. One was for £25,000, and another for £50,000. Mr Fleming, a chartered accountant, kept a note of the receipts.
He also kept backing documentation for some of the donations. In the case of both the £25,000 and £50,000 donations, Mr Haughey had asked that the receipts be made out to "anonymous".
However, Mr Fleming photocopied the two cheques and noted who Mr Haughey had told him the cheques had come from. He was told one was from the property developer, Mr Mark Kavanagh, and the other was from Dr Michael Smurfit.
We now know that Mr Kavanagh gave £100,000 to Mr Haughey in 1989, not the £25,000 handed to Mr Fleming. Mr Kavanagh presented his donation to Mr Haughey in his Kinsealy home on the morning of the election in the following form: one cheque for £25,000 made out to Fianna Fail; and three drafts for £25,000 each, made out to cash.
Mr Haughey requested the donation from Dr Smurfit. Acting on the instructions of the late Mr Des Traynor, Dr Smurfit had the sterling equivalent of £60,000 transferred from Monaco to the account of Guinness Mahon Cayman Trust in Henry Ansbacher bank in London. Where the money went next is not known.
Meanwhile, someone - most likely Mr Traynor - lodged the three drafts from Mr Kavanagh with Guinness & Mahon bank in Dublin.
The proceeds of one were withdrawn in cash, and the other two were used to buy a £50,000 draft made out to cash. This was given by Mr Haughey to Mr Fleming, credited to anonymous, and the receipt sent to Mr Haughey's office. Mr Fleming was told the £50,000 was from Dr Smurfit.
On July 19th, 1999, the Moriarty tribunal solicitor, Mr John Davis, wrote to the solicitors for Fianna Fail, Frank Ward & Co, seeking the records of the party for donations for the period covered by the tribunal's terms of reference. The solicitors suggested the tribunal contact Mr Hugh Dolan, head of finance and administration in party headquarters, which it did. In August Mr Davis and barrister Ms Jacqueline O'Brien visited party headquarters and were given the cash receipts books to study. No other records were made available.
In June of this year, Mr Davis again wrote to Frank Ward & Co, this time seeking copies of the records for 1989. This was because the tribunal had at this stage learned that Mr Kavanagh had given £100,000 to Mr Haughey in 1989.
The tribunal was given the cash receipts book it had seen during the August 1999 visit to the Fianna Fail HQ but not the second list prepared by Mr Fleming, and not the backing documentation which would help it identify the "anonymous" donors. It found no entry for Mr Kavanagh, though there were entries marked "anonymous" for amounts of £25,000, £50,000, and £75,000.
On Monday, June 19th last, the Fianna Fail lawyers and Mr Fleming met the tribunal's legal team in Dublin Castle. At that meeting the party solicitors handed over the list which identified which receipts had been given to Mr Haughey, and the background documentation which identified the anonymous donors. Why this happened at that meeting was not disclosed yesterday. With this new information the tribunal knew that Mr Kavanagh was only noted as having given £25,000.
It was then able to work out what had happened in relation to the donations from Dr Smurfit and Mr Kavanagh.
When the tribunal sat in public session on Tuesday, counsel for the tribunal, Mr John Coughlan SC, complained about Fianna Fail's delay in handing over the second list and background documentation. Mr Fleming, who was giving evidence, said he had no role in what the party had and had not given the tribunal in August 1999.
The following morning the party sought an opportunity to clarify matters but when Mr Fleming re-entered the witness-box, all he seemed to want to say was that the "second list" was really an extract of the first list. Mr Coughlan accepted this.
Fianna Fail spin doctors then began to push the line that the tribunal had admitted it had been mistaken in its comments on Tuesday. The Minister for Foreign Affairs, Mr Cowen, on RTE's Morning Ireland programme yesterday, said the station had incorrectly reported what had transpired, arguing that there was "no second list" and that the tribunal had accepted this.
It seems it was in response to all this that the tribunal decided yesterday to give extensive detail of the correspondence between it and Fianna Fail in relation to the 1989 documentation. The picture that emerged certainly did not show the party in a good light. That Fianna Fail's failure to supply all the relevant documentation "may have been inadvertent", was the strongest Mr Coughlan put it. The tribunal is not saying that Fianna Fail deliberately failed to produce vital documentation, he said at another stage. It is a matter ultimately for the chairman, Mr Justice Moriarty. Fianna Fail's level of co-operation is now part of the inquiry.