THERE WAS no evidence to link £2.3 million found in the home of a Cork financial adviser with the money taken in the Northern Bank raid and the State was in reality asking a jury to speculate that it came from the raid, a counsel for the accused declared yesterday.
Ciaran O’Loughlin SC said the prosecution was effectively saying the amount of money found at the home of Ted Cunningham was so large it must have come from the Northern Bank raid on December 20th, 2004, as there was no evidence to link the cash to the raid.
Summing up for the defence yesterday on the 42nd day of the trial, Mr O’Loughlin focused strongly on the 155,000 notes found in Mr Cunningham’s basement and recovered from various people to whom he had given money in late 2004 and early 2005.
Mr O’Loughlin said the prosecution had called several witnesses from the Northern Bank who identified their handwriting and other marks on some of the notes, but all that proved was that the notes had passed through the Northern Bank Cash Centre at some stage.
The State had produced one note from the Newtownabbey branch with a partially visible date stamp “15 or 16 Dec” but there was nothing to say it was December 2004 and it could just as easily have been December of any preceding year, he said.
Mr O’Loughlin pointed out that one of the notes was issued in March 1993 while thousands had been traced back to 1997, 1998 and 1999, with further large tranches dating from 2001 and 2002 with only two notes dating from the 11-week period before the robbery.
“They have failed utterly to prove that this money came from the Northern Bank raid,” said Mr O’Loughlin before going on to remind the jury at Cork Circuit Criminal Court that it was not at all unusual for Mr Cunningham to handle large sums of sterling.
He pointed out to the jury that they had heard evidence from John and Jack Douglas from Tullamore that Mr Cunningham had given them some £50,000 to mind in early December 2004 before the robbery and this was cash which clearly did not come from the raid.
And he said that they had also heard evidence of gardaí recovering First Trust £20 notes from accountant Declan Whelan in Portlaoise which were given to him by Mr Cunningham and which were found to have been issued after the bank raid.
The fact that both these sets of notes had been excluded from the charges by the State was “just to save their blushes at being laughed out of court,” said Mr O’Loughlin. Mr Cunningham’s testimony that he got the money from Bulgarians “may not be the most attractive explanation ever heard, but it is the only explanation” he said.
He added the deal was at an advanced stage and the State had sought to disregard it because it did not suit their case.
“You are being invited by the State to cherrypick and believe all the bits about the Northern people but to ignore all the statements about the Bulgarians.
“You are being asked to believe all the bits that suit the prosecution and ignore the bits that suit Mr Cunningham,” he said.
