A US businessman who set up a company which manufactured buses for CIE during the 1980s was named yesterday at the Moriarty tribunal as one of the investors in Celtic Helicopters.
Mr Cruse W. Moss took out a shareholding in Celtic Helicopters in 1985, the year the helicopter company was set up. He sold the shareholding for £7,800 in May 1990 to Larchfield Securities, a Haughey family company holding assets for the children of Mr Charles Haughey.
Mr Moss is the former chairman and chief executive of General Automotive Corp, a US company which bought the former Bombardier plant in Shannon in the early 1980s. The plant built buses that it sold to CIE. It never managed to generate export orders and ceased operations in the late 1980s.
CIE bought buses from GAC to support Irish employment, even though they cost more than buses made elsewhere, one CIE source said last night. CIE bought "500 to 600 buses over the period, at around £100,000 each", the source said. GAC, based in Michigan and once the largest bus maker in the US, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 1997, with reported liabilities of $33.1 million.
Earlier this week another US businessman who did significant business with the State was named as a Celtic Helicopters investor. Mr Guy Snowden was a former chairman and major shareholder in G-Tech, the US corporation which secured a multimillion contract to run the National Lottery system in 1987.
Also this week, Mr Michael Murphy, of Mike Murphy Insurance Brokers, Trinity Street, Dublin, told the tribunal that he arranged an investment of £100,000 in Celtic Helicopters. The investment was by a European businessman with whom he does business, he said.
Mr David Gresty, of D.B. Agencies, Monaco, invested the money in late 1992, when Celtic Helicopters was in a very difficult financial position.
Mr Murphy is currently being sued by the Department of Agriculture in relation to a fire in a meat plant in Ballaghaderreen, Co Roscommon. In 1992 a fire destroyed frozen beef in the plant valued at more than £20 million. At the time Mr Murphy's brokerage had the contract with the Department of Agriculture for insurance cover on beef held in intervention. His company had the contract between May 1990 and May 1993, and won it after an open competitive tendering process.
The main insurer was a Paris-based company called Alte Leipziger. The Department, seeking to recoup the value of the lost beef, issued proceedings against that company in September 1993. It issued proceedings against Mr Murphy's company in July 1997 and against Mr Murphy personally in January 1998. Alte Leipziger lost a case in the High Court where it was arguing that the case against it should be heard in Paris. The company is currently appealing that ruling to the Supreme Court.
In the Dail on Wednesday Mr Des O'Malley of the Progressive Democrats said Mr Murphy "has been a close associate of and long-time insurance broker to Mr Larry Goodman. He helped to negotiate Mr Goodman's earliest export credit insurance cover for Iraq."