THEY flew from Dublin to London, London to Miami, and changed there for the Cayman Islands. The 22-hour journey brought them to the small Caribbean island which passed a law in 1976 that transformed it into the fifth- largest banking sector in the world.
The purpose of the law was to impose strict confidentiality on financial dealings, yet the four men - an Irish High Court judge, two barristers and a solicitor - were seeking a breakthrough in their investigations into one of the most closely guarded secrets in Irish society: the financial arrangements of Charles J. Haughey.
The flight from Miami touched down in the small Cayman Islands airport on Sunday night, April 20th. Mr Justice Brian McCracken, senior counsels Denis McCullough and Michael Collins, and tribunal solicitor John Lawless were met at the airport by Charlie Quin, a lawyer and native of Northern Ireland who had been working in the Cayman Islands for 12 years.
Quin brought them to the Hyatt Regency, on the West Bay Road that runs alongside Seven Mile Beach. Tired after their long journey, the tribunal team checked into their villas in the hotel complex: the two barristers and the solicitor shared one, McCracken was in another. Quin had got them a special rate.
The next day, Monday, was a public holiday on the island but the four Irishmen went to the offices of Quin & Hampson on the third floor of a four- storey building on North Church Street.
The offices were opened especially for them and they took over a conference room with a plate-glass window looking out on the Caribbean harbour. They set out the large number of files they'd brought with them and got down to work.
It was hot but the offices were air-conditioned. Out in the harbour they could see pleasure cruisers, yachts and fishing boats.
THE Tribunal of Inquiry (Dunnes Payments), set up by John Bruton in February was trying to follow the trail left by approximately Pounds 1.3 million which Ben Dunne said he'd paid to Charles Haughey but which Haughey denied ever getting.
The money was paid by Dunne between 1987 and 1991, during which period Haughey was Taoiseach. It passed through a complicated series of transactions designed to ensure it could never be traced. It was the need to ensure confidentiality that prompted Dunne's offer that he on his own, and not a number of businessmen to whom similar requests for financial assistance for Haughey were to be made, would give the money to allow the Taoiseach pay off his debts.
"Christ picked 12 apostles and one of them crucified him," Dunne had said at the time. Better not ask too many people - it was bound to get out.
Now, to years later, the complicated trail left by the money led to accounts held in two Dublin banks in the name of a Cayman Islands bank.
Judge Patterson heard the application in chambers - a small air- conditioned room - on Thursday, April 24th. He sat through Friday and returned for the hearing the following Tuesday. The application was made by Tony Bueno, a QC from London, who does a lot of work in the Cayman Islands, and Quin. McCullough, Collins and Lawless sat in and advised, and McCracken was an observer.
The case dragged on longer than the Irish team had expected, the procedures in the Caribbean court being more elaborate and slower than they were used to, and there were also lengthy forays into the - for a Cayman court - rarefied area of Irish constitutional law.
Quin had done work like this before.
He had worked on a case involving a tribunal established by the Peruvian Congress to investigate a contract for the construction of a railroad signed between an Italian consortium and the Peruvian government in 1989. There had been allegations of corruption against Peruvian officials and the then Peruvian president, Alan Garcia.
The money trail led to the Cayman Islands, and the tribunal, made up of members of Congress, had made an approach to the Cayman courts, an approach identical to the one now being made by the McCracken tribunal.
The Peruvians were successful. Quin knew all about the case, however, because he had represented the other side, World Wide Financial Holdings, and he had helped them lodge their appeal, which they won.
The Dublin team were hoping they had a better chance. Their tribunal had been set up by the Oireachtas and the sole member was a High Court judge. What's more, the law under which they had made their successful application to the High Court in London was one to which the Cayman Islands, as a Crown Colony or Dependent Territory, gave regard.
There were, however, two significant snags. One was the straightforward fact that the people and companies who stashed billions of dollars, pounds, yen and deutschmarks in the Cayman Islands did so because they believed the legal edifice did not give easy access to prying eyes, government appointed or otherwise.
The second was John Furze.
JOHN FURZE is a retired banker who lives in a West Bay Road from the Hyatt. He's a middle-aged gravelly-voiced man with a worn face. Born in Norwich, England, he has lived on the Cayman Islands for 30 years.
He got an MBE in 1988 and was once a prominent banker on the island. He is a former managing director of Ansbacher Cayman Ltd, or Guinness Mahon Cayman Trust as it was called in 1987 when Ben Dunne made his first payment to Charles Haughey.
The search for money for Haughey had been made by the late accountant and banker, Des Traynor, who had been close to Haughey and had established the Cayman bank with Furze in 1973.
Traynor was a joint managing director of Guinness & Mahon, a bank in Dame Street in Dublin and one of the two into which the Dunne money had eventually arrived for deposit in accounts held by the Cayman bank (Guinness Mahon Cayman Trust).
Traynor was chairman of the Cayman bank, Furze an important figure on the island. Now he was perhaps the most important figure on the island from whom the tribunal wished to hear evidence.
He engaged the legal firm of Myers and Alberga and lodged an objection to the Dublin tribunal's application. His lawyers argued that the tribunal was not a proper judicial authority involved in civil proceedings and adjudicating on fact. Furze never turned up at the court and the Irish team never got to see him.
For three days the two legal teams made their cases to Judge Patterson. The Irish side had brought with them an affidavit from Mr Gerard Hogan, outlining the history of the tribunal and relevant details as to Irish law.
On the evening of Tuesday, May 28th, the case was winding to a close. The Irish team were anxious that it be wrapped up, not least because they wanted to catch a flight that left that night for London. A few hours' delay would mean having to make the long trip back via Miami. They finished and hurried off to meet their flight.
Soon afterwards the case ended, with Judge Patterson reserving his decision. The Irishmen need not have rushed; their flight was delayed for two hours.
They had no decision. At issue was whether the tribunal would be recognised at all. If it was, then under Cayman law a second hurdle would have to be negotiated. In the particular issue they were investigating, should the bankers be directed to give the evidence sought, taking into account the islands' confidentiality law?
The danger very much still existed that the trail was going to run out, that the confidentiality used by Traynor to hide the money would work as he had intended. Yet, though the team was going home without their application having been granted, it has now emerged they were returning with something almost as valuable - a lead on where to look in Dublin if they wanted to pick up the trail lost in the Caribbean.
ON Monday last, the tribunal resumed its hearings in Dublin Castle. Denis McCullough stood up in the large first-floor room after McCracken asked him to "bring people up to date on what has been happening since we sat last." He did and he didn't: he told half the story, he gave some intriguing hints.
The Cayman accounts held in the Dublin banks were not normal accounts. Money from different sources and belonging to different people resident in Ireland was placed in the accounts and the banks didn't know who owned it.
McCullough said he would call these monies the Ansbacher Deposits.
The key to who owned the money was in "memorandum accounts" kept by Traynor and an associate of his in the bank, Padraig Collery. These records were not kept with the rest of the bank's documents and may not be among the material given to the tribunal in response to requests or orders.
When the tribunal first got information about these deposits all they got was records of money going in and money going out, with the amount in the deposits at times reaching Pounds 40 million. They had no information as to who owned the money. Their job was to trace the Pounds 1.3 million but it disappeared into this banking and accountancy soup.
McCullough told the tribunal: "The Cayman bank does have records showing the individual account or accounts into which the monies were paid by Mr Dunne or into the accounts to which they ultimately went after Mr Dunne had made the payments."
The bank, "while in a general way not being particularly uncooperative", was awaiting the decision of the Grand Court in the Cayman Islands. Nevertheless, as an indirect consequence of the tribunal's work in Cayman, considerable progress had been made on the team's return to Dublin.
Little else was given on this by McCullough. However, during the tribunal's visit to the Caribbean and its long days spent working in the Quin & Hampson offices, they presumably had contact with lawyers from Myers and Alberga as the case was being prepared.
They had other contacts to do with their case in the Grand Court, which involved a number of bankers as well as the bank itself. And they had contacts to do with their case in the Grand Court, which involved a number of bankers as well as the bank itself. And they had contacts to do with their work back home in Dublin.
Back in Dublin from the Cayman Islands, crucial information on where to look came into its own.
McCullough told last Monday's hearing: "The tribunal team has now been able to obtain information from certain people who will give evidence to the tribunal which will very considerably assist in completing the payment trail even without, as we do not have at present, the information from the bank in the Cayman."
McCullough outlined details to do with two accountants in the Haughey Boland accountancy firm, Paul Carty and Jack Stakelum. He seemed to be indicating that the lead or leads the tribunal had found in the Caribbean led the tribunal to information about the role played by Traynor's banking colleague, Collery, and the Haughey Boland accountancy firm.
Back in Ireland the tribunal soon discovered that regular and substantial payments were made by Traynor to the accountancy firm and that the two accountants, first Carty and then, after 1991, Stakelum, had been given the task of handling these monies to pay off "various bills and expenses of Charles J. Haughey.
Stakelum, McCullough said kept a chequebook which he used to pay the money and he kept a record both of all the money received from Traynor and all the money paid out. He also kept invoices. This didn't provide the link between the Pounds 1.3 million and Haughey. But McCullough had more to tell.
After Traynor's death in 1994 Collery, who had worked closely with Traynor in Guinness & Mahon and subsequently when they both left, took over Traynor's role in the complex financial system.
He took over Traynor's function in relation to the Ansbacher deposits, liaised with the Cayman bank, and kept up the arrangement of sending money to the Haughey Boland firm (to Stakelum).
"Mr Collery's evidence will be that these monies came from the Ansbacher accounts," said McCullough.
He would be more specific. Collery, McCullough said, would tell the tribunal that the money for Haughey came from memorandum accounts coded 58 and 59, which were accounts used to "defray Mr Haughey's living expenses
The tribunal had found a trail on both sides of the Cayman confidentiality laws: a trail that led to the islands and left it again. Precisely what went on there remained a mystery, but it was apparent that the Dunne money had gone into the Ansbacher deposits and money had been withdrawn from accounts which formed part of these deposits and were used to pay Haughey's living expenses.
Traynor was on both sides of the Cayman blackspot. The evidence was strong. Haughey's counsel, who up to last Monday had been declining an offer of full recognition before the tribunal, said his client now accepted that "as a matter of probability" the Pounds 1.3 million had been paid into accounts managed on his behalf by Traynor.
The admission was extraordinary. When Dunnes first asked Haughey if he had got money from Ben Dunne, he dismissed the query almost with contempt. He told Margaret Heffernan that her brother seemed to be unstable. Now, faced with fresh evidence from the tribunal lawyers, he "probably" got the money after all.
THE tribunal team were content after Monday's hearing. They had been asked to find who had received Ben Dunne's Pounds 1.3 million and they had done that. They had traced it to Haughey. They had served him with a subpoena the previous week. He was going to claim that he didn't know he'd been given the money by Dunne but that didn't take away from the their achievement.
Haughey's acceptance that he probably received the money means the tribunal team will now stop scratching around his finances, looking for signs of the Dunne money and coming across information not relevant to their task.
They've learned some but by no means all of the names of the other Irish residents who had money in the Ansbacher deposits. Haughey's accounts were identified by the codes 58 and 59.
There are other accounts coded St, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56 and 57 in the Ansbacher deposits. Other letters of the alphabet are used to code other account-holders. The tribunal team has not learned who else, if anyone, was giving money to Haughey, though they may have come across some signposts.
It could be that they have evidence of more than Pounds 1.3 million coming out of the Ansbacher deposits for Haughey since Ben Dunne made his first payment in 1987. It is known that Collery was operating the procedure after Traynnr's death in 1994. It is not clear up to how recently the records uncovered by the tribunal team refer.
Judge Patterson refused the tribunal's application to the Grand Court and an appeal is now being prepared, The files kept by Traynor may no longer exist and if there are traces in Ireland of where other Haughey money in the Ansbacher deposits came from, the tribunal team are unlikely to stumble across them now.
But very soon, they'll have a chance to ask the former Taoiseach in person when he is invited to explain, under oath, his personal financial arrangements. No doubt, the Revenue Commissioners will be taking notes.