Nelson hopes letters to Ahern will clear her name

AN Irish woman on hunger strike to protest her innocence of involvement in laundering money from the Northern Bank raid was in correspondence with the Minister for Foreign Affairs weeks before the robbery.

Kathryn Nelson said the letters between herself and Foreign Affairs Minister Dermot Ahern while she was based in Bulgaria in late 2004 made nonsense of suggestions she was engaged in activities that were in any way linked to criminality.

“If I was about to rob a bank or get involved in money laundering, I would hardly be advertising my presence to a senior Government minister, pinpointing my location and telling him about the kind of business I was doing,” she said.

In her letter of October 20, 2004, Ms Nelson complained to Mr Ahern about the difficulties she had contacting the Irish Consul in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, and about the conditions of the consulate offices where she described finding “to my horror” the Tricolour “flung in a corner as a badly reared person might abandon a pair of shoes”.

In his reply, on November 9, Mr Ahern’s private secretary wrote that the minister was sorry to hear her reports but explained that the consul was absent at the time owing to illness and the national flag had been taken down for cleaning.

It concluded: “The minister has asked me to thank you for writing to him on this matter. He greatly values the interest you have taken in the official representation of Ireland abroad.”

Ms Nelson, 57, was working as a private diplomatic liaison officer assisting investors and business people in the Balkans and southern Europe when the £26.5 million (€39m) robbery took place in Belfast in December 2004. It was quickly blamed on the IRA although no one has been convicted in relation to it.

The following month she accompanied former Government adviser, Phil Flynn, and Cork money lender, Ted Cunningham, on an investment exploration trip around Bulgaria. That trip led to claims by Justice Minister Michael McDowell that the IRA was intent on laundering money in Bulgaria.

Both Mr Flynn and Mr Cunningham were questioned by gardaí but neither have been charged.

Ms Nelson was also arrested and, although never charged, she said the cloud of suspicion that had hung over her since ruined her reputation, her career and had left her penniless.

She now lives in the Isle of Man and began a hunger strike two weeks ago today in an attempt to extract a statement by the gardaí or the Irish Government that she is no longer a suspect.

In the days following the revelations about the investment trip, it emerged gardaí were also investigating a visit by two Bulgarian men to Ireland in the weeks before the Northern Bank raid.

In her letter, Ms Nelson volunteered information about a planned trip to Ireland by two Bulgarian business men and explained it was her efforts to acquire visas for them that led her to the Irish Consulate.