GOTCHA!

This article was first published in the Irish Mail on Sunday on 29/04/2012

Words By Michael O’Farrell
Exclusive Photos by Sean Dwyer

HEAD bowed, this was former Fianna Fáil minister Ned O’Keeffe walking out of Cobh Garda Station on Friday night after being questioned for 11 hours on suspicion of making false expenses claims.

Our exclusive picture shows the normally ebullient Mr O’Keeffe looking distinctly glum as he left.
Mr O’Keeffe had no comment to make on the Fraud Squad probe, which was sparked by the Irish Mail on Sunday’s investigation into TDs’ expenses claims almost two years ago.

Since we first highlighted serious questions over the invoices used by Mr O’Keeffe to claim thousands of euro from taxpayers, this paper has campaigned ceaselessly to have the issue formally investigated by the Dáil.
Yet from the very beginning, the Leinster House authorities – headed by Kieran Coughlan, the Clerk of the Dáil – insisted time and again that the expenses claims in question were wholly legitimate. They also launched repeated attacks on the MoS for our reporting of the issue.

Eventually, the MoS was forced to take its file to gardaí – who appear to have quickly established that there was enough evidence to justify arresting Mr O’Keeffe.
Gardaí were also able to persuade a judge that there was sufficient evidence to grant them a warrant to allow them to search Mr O’Keeffe’s home on Friday following his arrest. Mr O’Keeffe has always insisted he is innocent of any wrongdoing.

Nevertheless, attention will now focus on the Clerk of the Dáil and his staff – including Oireachtas Press Officer Mark Mulqueen and parliamentary legal adviser Melissa English – who have repeatedly insisted that there was no question of any possible wrongdoing by Mr O’Keeffe, or of the expense claims in question having been irregular in any way.

The Clerk of the Dáil knew about O’Keeffe in 2010… but he was NEVER investigated

As the former minister is arrested over his mobile phone claims, Oireachtas czar Kieran Coughlan is under intense pressure to explain why he failed to initiate any probe into the bogus bills

By: Michael O’Farrell
Investigations Editor

THE position of the Dáil’s most powerful civil servant is under growing pressure this weekend following the failure of Leinster House to investigate the bogus expenses claims of Ned O’Keeffe – claims that led to the former TD’s arrest on Friday.

Kieran Coughlan, the Clerk of the Dáil, was first asked almost 18 months ago to trigger a parlimentary probe into Mr O’Keeffe’s claims, which were made using fake invoices.

However, despite repeated requests to Mr Coughlan for an official probe, no Dáil investigation was ever carried out. Instead, Mr Coughlan repeatedly insisted that the expenses claims in question were wholly legitimate and that there was no question of them being ‘irregular’.

In the face of Mr Coughlan’s stance, the matter was eventually reported to gardaí instead – and on Friday, fraud squad detectives arrested Mr O’Keeffe on suspicion of fraud regarding the mobile-phone invoices.

Mr O’Keeffe was released on Friday night and a file on the case has been sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Mr Coughlan is now under intense pressure to explain why he was so adamant that there was no evidence of any possible wrongdoing when gardaí clearly believed there was sufficient evidence to arrest the one-time cabinet minister.

He is also likely to face uncomfortable questions as to why the Clerk of the Dáil has such seemingly arbitrary power over parliamentary investigations.

The latest saga began in October 2010, when the MoS revealed that Mr O’Keeffe, then still a TD in the ruling Fianna Fáil party, had claimed for almost €3,000 from taxpayers using bogus invoices.

The MoS was able to point out a string of basic errors in the invoices, including wrong VAT rates, missing invoice numbers and wholly incorrect amounts charged for work allegedly done.

Within days, a concerned member of the public, John Mulligan, had written to Mr Coughlan asking him to initiate an investigation into one of the bogus claims.

Mr Coughlan acts as the gatekeeper to the Oireachtas committee that investigates alleged transgressions by TDs: all requests for an inquiry have to be vetted by him.

However, rather than passing the O’Keeffe complaint on for formal investigation, Mr Coughlan wrote back to Mr Mulligan, insisting that he quote in detail the legislation that he believed had been contravened.

Mr Mulligan did as requested and wrote back with what was his second request for an investigation. Once again, however, no investigation was launched.

Instead of passing this second complaint on for investigation, Mr Coughlan held onto it for almost six weeks. During that period, he contacted Mr O’Keeffe and allowed him to ‘resubmit’ the bogus expenses claim that had been exposed by the MoS.

Once this had been done, Mr Coughlan wrote back to Mr Mulligan saying that Mr O’Keeffe had done nothing wrong, insisting: ‘The claim and payments made by and to the deputy are within the ambit of the scheme.’ A disheartened Mr Mulligan, feeling that he had hit ‘a brick wall’, agreed to withdraw his claim – but only briefly. Weeks later, he wrote back to Mr Coughlan, once again demanding that the bogus claim be investigated.

Again Mr Coughlan replied to Mr Mulligan, this time claiming that the ‘error’ in Mr O’Keeffe’s expenses claim had been ‘clarified’ and that ‘the amounts involved are not in question’. The clerk concluded his letter by stating that he was treating this latest request for an investigation as ‘an administrative matter’ unless Mr Mulligan issued yet another formal complaint.

By the time Mr Mulligan managed to issue another complaint – his fourth written request for an investigation – the Dáil had been dissolved for the general election and Mr O’Keeffe was no longer a TD.

Mr Coughlan wrote back saying that ex-TDs could not be investigated by the Dáil – adding that: ‘There is no question that this expenses claim remains “irregular”.’ When the MoS highlighted the failure of the Dáil to investigate this possible fraud on taxpayers, Mr Coughlan’s office responded not by launching an inquiry but by lodging a series of complaints against this newspaper to the Press Ombudsman and the Press Council.

Of all the complaints filed by Mr Coughlan or Dáil staff on his behalf, only one was upheld. All the others were rejected, and were rejected again on appeal.

Meanwhile, the bogus invoices were still not being investigated. Eventually, the MoS decided to hand its dossier to the Garda Bureau of Fraud Investigation.

Their investigtion culminated in the arrest on Friday of Mr O’Keeffe on suspicion of fraud using a false instrument.

Mr Mulligan, the man who made the four written requests for a Dáil investigation, said last night that the episode did not reflect well on parliament’s ability to police itself.

‘When I made the original complaint to the Clerk of the Dáil, I felt I got the run-around,’ Mr Mulligan said last night. Then, when I tried to resubmit the complaint, having thought it over again, I was stymied again because Ned O’Keeffe was no longer a TD.

‘I think that the attempts not to deal with it that I came up against in the beginning were wrong and the gardaí have to be complimented now in taking this forward and investigating it promptly,’ he said.

This weekend, the MoS asked Mr Coughlan whether he thought his position was tenable given the Garda investigation and arrest of Mr O’Keeffe. We also asked whether Mr Coughlan still felt he had acted correctly in declining to investigate Mr O’Keeffe’s expense claims.

A spokesman for the Oireachtas replied, saying: ‘As this is a matter currently with An Garda Siochána, we will not be making any comment at present.’ Mr O’Keeffe, who insists he has done nothing wrong, will now have to await a decision on the case by the DPP. If he were charged, tried and convicted, he could face a sentence of up to ten years in prison.