SIPTU to publish report on controversial €4.5m fund this month

SIPTU wants to publish a report within the next three weeks on the controversial SIPTU National Health and Local Authority Levy Fund into which the state and private sources placed almost €4.5 million between 2001-2010, but which the union has repeatedly insisted it knew nothing about.

Issues with the account — the signatories to which were SIPTU official Matt Merrigan and union member Jack Kelly — first became public at the start of the summer as part of an investigation into the HSE’s SKILL training fund.

A considerable part of the €4.48m lodged in the health and local authority levy fund had come from SKILL, and the HSE probe found serious breaches in the way the training fund was governed, as well as a lack of receipts for much of the money paid out.

In subsequent months, details emerged of further payments into the account, including €924,000 from the Health Service National Partnership Forum.

A few days before Christmas, SIPTU general secretary Joe O’Flynn wrote to the Public Accounts Committee, which is looking into the SKILL programme, confirming the two individuals linked to the union were the people who established and operated the account. He also confirmed, trustees of the union were currently examining the account and compiling a report on it.

However, Mr O’Flynn said legal advisors to Mr Merrigan and Mr Kelly had commissioned a forensic examination of the operation of the account by accounting firm Grant Thornton and the trustees could not conclude their report until reviewing the Grant Thornton report.

Even though the union has been waiting for that correspondence for months, it still had not received it as of yesterday.

It is understood that once that information is received, the report will be considered by the union’s trustee sub-committee and then by its full executive at its meeting in the third week of January.

HSE chief executive Cathal Magee has told the Public Accounts Committee that his organisation will not complete its investigation into the SKILL programme until it receives the report from SIPTU.