Policing Board chairman resigns from property firm

The chairman of the North's Policing Board has resigned from a property development firm as a result of the ongoing garda investigation into alleged money-laundering in the Republic.

Desmond Rae said he was resigning from the board of Ivy Wood Properties because of newspaper coverage of Phil Flynn's decision to step down from Harcourt Developments.

Ivy Wood is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Harcourt Developments.

In a statement, Mr Rae said he had decided to stand down as soon as he learned that there may be a link, however tenuous, between Ivy Wood and the Garda operation in the Republic.

He said he had no information whatsoever to link Ivy Wood to any wrongdoing and had resigned simply as a precautionary measure.

Mr Flynn, a former ICTU president and chairman of the decommissioning implementation body, resigned from a range of positions last week after it emerged that he was non-executive director of the Cork financial firm at the centre of the money-laundering investigation.