Sherlock Holmes had Professor Moriarty as his nemesis, Charles Haughey has Mr Justice Michael Moriarty.
So Haughey really was as bad, or if not worse than a lot of us had feared. He was a thief, a corrupter and ultimately a cheap little man (figuratively speaking of course).
Haughey and his kind almost destroyed politics in this country by completely undermining politics’ already damaged reputation.
I think one of the most despicable things he did was stealing the money from Brian Lenihan’s liver transplant fund. Of the 265,000 euro raised no more than 70,000 euro was spent on Lenihan. The missing 190,000 euro was pocketed by Charlie. That’s low, very low, even for a man like Haughey.
Not content with that Haughey was also selling off our citizenship to all sorts of characters like Saudi sheikh Mahomoud Fustok who paid Haughey 60,000 euro for passports.
The rest of his money came from payments from businessmen between 1979 and 1996. Businessmen like Ben Dunne.
This still wasn’t enough money to fund Haughey who by 1979 had a debt with AIB of over one-million-pounds i.e. punts not euro. That is a frightening sum even today.
According to the Moriarty tribunal the Bank exhibited a marked deference towards Mr Haughey and his debt.
Believe you me; AIB can be pretty ruthless with debtors. So can the Revenue Commissioners who did not bother to ask Charlie where all the money was coming from or even to ask him to pay tax on it.
Still not getting enough money it appears that Haughey was treating the Leader’s Allowance Account, which is paid by the taxpayers, as his own personal account, dipping into to it for cash anytime it suited him.
There was no end to Haughey’s greed and no end of people happy to stand by and let him have his way. Shame on him, shame on them.
No comments:
Post a Comment