Access to Information Updates
As part of an ongoing process. This is the appointments diary of the Minister for the Environment for 2010. Some entries in Minister’s diary were deleted as they related to Government meetings and associated records (s.19), Parliamentary matters (s.22) and personal Information of parties other than the requester (s.28).
Last week in the Sunday Times Mark Tighe wrote a story about the brankruptcy filing of Cork developer John Fleming of Fleming construction. Mr Fleming moved to England, availing of bankruptcy laws there, leaving behind debts of over €1 billion. He is due to emerge from bankruptcy on November 10 this year, as under the British system, he and his wife can expect to be discharged from bankruptcy within 12 months, compared with up to 12 years under the Irish system.
The Sunday Times were kind enough to share the documents with me, and are partially reproduced below (I have removed Mr Fleming’s phone bill, contract of employment, pay slips, tenancy agreement etc). Please note the documents are in no particular order, so may be a little confusing. I have tried to organise them as logically as possible.
As part of an ongoing process. This document details the expenditure by the Department of the Taoiseach on legal services for the five years from 2006 to 2010. It mostly refers to expenditure in relation to the Moriarty Tribunal, but there are other interesting nuggets in there. Unfortunately, while the data is held on an Oracle database, and it was requested in a digital spreadsheet format, it was not released in this manner. Instead the data was printed to tables, and I had to scan the pages. Conversion to spreadsheets takes time.
Continue reading “Expenditure on legal services – Department of the Taoiseach 2006 to 2010”
As part of an ongoing process. This is the FOI request log (the record of what people asked for in their FOI requests)for the Department of the Taoiseach from January 2010 to May 2011 inclusive.
Continue reading “Department of the Taoiseach FOI log 2010 – 2011”
I recently obtained interesting documents from a Florida court which outline further details of the investigation into tax evasion by people formerly associated with Portsmouth Football Club.
The investigation is part of ‘Operation Apprentice’ a long standing investigation into alleged football corruption. In 2007, then Portsmouth chief executive Peter Storrie was arrested — along with then manager Harry Redknapp, then club owner Milan Mandaric (now owner of Sheffield Wednesday), agent Willie McKay and former Portsmouth player Amdy Faye — over allegations of corruption. The five men were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and false accounting.
Last year Redknapp, who is the current manager at Tottenham, was charged with “two counts of cheating the public revenue of an estimated £40,000 after voluntarily attending London’s Bishopsgate police station”. Redknapp has been touted as a successor to Fabio Capello as England football manager. According to The Independent:
Charges concerned two payments, totalling 295,000 US dollars, alleged to have been made from Mandaric to Redknapp via a bank account in Monaco, evading the tax and National Insurance contributions due between April 1, 2002 and November 28, 2007.
Mandaric, now chairman of Leicester, was charged with tax evasion relating to the payment of 295,000 US dollars to another person via a Monaco bank account, evading tax and National Insurance.
Storrie was charged with concealing a signing-on fee for ex-Portsmouth player Amdy Faye by paying it into the midfielder’s bank account.
The allegation related to the transfer of Faye from Auxerre to Fratton Park for £1.5million in August 2003.
For his part, Redknapp sought to have the case against him dismissed in November last year.
But according to these court documents, the Crown Prosecution Service sought the assistance of the US Department of Justice in September 2010 relating to the transfer of $295,000 from the Florida bank account of a company called First Star International to an account held by Redknapp in Monaco.
Also included in a list given by the CPS was one payment by “Rosie 47” of $207,433.73 on February 12, 2008 to Redknapp. This payment was two months after he was arrested in November 2007. The source of another lodgment in June 2002, for $145,000, is unclear.
The CPS requested US authorities to assist them in obtaining information from the bank used by First Star International – the City National Bank of Florida. According to the CPS letter:
When Milan Mandaric was questioned in relation to payments made to Henry Redknapp, he admitted that he had made one payment to him which was for an investment. He denied that he had used an off shore account to conceal payments upon which tax was payable. We have identified a pattern of offshore accounts being used to make payments to employees of Portsmouth Football club without accounting for the tax due on such payments.
You will note from the above table that two payments were made to Henry Redknapp from a company called First Star International. Internet searches have named Mandaric as a director of the company and that First Star International Inc is a company formed in California in 1988 and authorised to do business in Florida in 2001. We have identified the account number from an exhibit in our case which is an email sent from Mandaric’s solicitor to the Harry Radknapp’s solicitor requesting the repayment of a loan. The request states that the loan should be repaid to the account at First Star International and states the account number.
The company has a bank account at
City National Bank of Florida
Private Client Group
Miami
Florida 33130
The CPS stated:
The further evidence that we are seeking is expected to prove that at the material time, Mr. Mandaric was the director of First International. This will in turn assist the prosecution show that he was for responsible for making/authorising payments to the account in Monaco held by Mr. Redknapp and that these payments are for services that have not been declared for tax purposes, rather than a one off payment for an investment opportunity as Mandaric has suggested when questioned.
As far as I am aware these documents are the subject of a court order by Southwark Crown Court and therefore the British media have been unable to publish stories about them. The documents are published below in full (thanks to Offshore Alert).
Continue reading “Harry Redknapp, tax evasion and Mandaric's 'offshore account'”
During the week NAMA released this document (thanks NWL) showing the addresses of properties subject to enforcement action. Unfortunately as is often the case with public authorities they released the data in PDF table format, rather than as a spreadsheet. Asking for a KML file probably would have been expecting too much.
With that in mind I converted the PDF back to a spreadsheet, combined the address columns into one column, and then geocoded using the excellent Google Fusion Tables. The result is NOT 100% accurate, I still have to clean up some rows, but generally the information is geographically correct. Here is the result. Click on a red dot to get the associated information.
As part of an ongoing process. This is the appointments diary of the Taoiseach for the year 2008.
As part of an ongoing process. This is the appointments diary of the then Taoiseach Brian Cowen for 2010:
As part of an ongoing process. This is the appointments diary of the then Taoiseach Brian Cowen for 2009:
For convenience: