Fraud at Iarnród Éireann costs €2.5m

AN INTERNAL fraud at Iarnród Éireann has cost the company €2.5 million in materials and loss of EU grants, the company said yesterday.

The fraud involved the unauthorised sale of redundant sleepers from the company’s North Wall site and what Iarnród Éireann called “other plant procurement issues”. It was identified in reviews by the company, which said three staff had been dismissed and gardaí informed.

The company said issues relating to the loss of sleepers, plant procurement and removal of soil had cost the company €900,000.

However, a further loss of €800,000 was suffered due to the non-eligibility of procurement activities for EU grants, while the procurement issues themselves had cost the company €780,000.

In a statement yesterday, the company said of €2.5 million, just €670,000 related to fraud within Iarnród Éireann.

“To place this in context, these areas collectively in the period reviewed . . . had expenditure on external vendors totalling approximately €800 million and the amounts of losses represent less than one-third of 1 per cent of the total external expenditure in these departments”.

Fine Gael transport spokesman Fergus O’Dowd said the statement showed Iarnród Éireann should not be exempt from Freedom of Information requests. “CIÉ is an organisation that hoovers up over €300 million a year in taxpayers’ money to help run its loss-making services. This is in addition to the €1 billion-plus it has received to help purchase new infrastructure.

“I have consistently argued that there was absolutely no transparency on how this money was spent or accounted for.”