Another taxing situation for Lowry, the Alan Partridge of Irish politics
I was wrong. I should have compared Lowry to the comedy figure Alan Partridge. Lowry has become the Alan Partridge of Irish politics.
Partridge briefly became a star with his own television chat show, one that lasted about as long as Lowry’s ministerial career. The story continued with Partridge’s decline to the rural backwater of Radio Norwich where he was important and blamed everybody but himself for his own misfortunes, to hilarious effect.
Lowry is increasingly irrelevant as a national figure but he still provides us with great laughs with his righteous indignation, his painfully grieved declarations of victimhood and his failure to ever admit he could be in the wrong.
The only problem is that the last laugh might be on us, the mugs who pay him over €100,000 a year (when tax free expenses are included) to represent us in Dáil Éireann (although of course he seems to think he represents only the people of Tipperary North).
Partridge of course ended up living in grubby hotel rooms and caravan parks. Lowry, despite all of his financial misfortunes, continues to live in some considerable luxury, particularly in the house at Holy Cross in Tipperary, which was partly built for him with money from the salesman Ben Dunne. It was paid in a way to avert the prying eyes of the taxman.
That’s the house that was raided by the Revenue Commissioners last week, as a team of 15 officials swooped to search furniture, wardrobes and bedrooms for more than three hours, apparently leaving with a small amount of documents which included political statements, handwritten notes, and bank details. Lowry and his mates are furious. His solicitor has claimed “the principle of taxpayer confidentiality has completely and totally been trampled on as far as this individual is concerned ... It is typical of 20 years of selective leaks concerning this man.” There is absolutely no evidence Revenue leaked details of the raid. It has no form for doing things like that.
Lowry meanwhile told his local radio station he always paid what he owed and did so in a timely fashion.
Lowry a tax defaulter, made a settlement with the Revenue of €1.4 million back in 2007 and is currently being sued by his accountancy firm for a bill of €1m. That firm, led by Denis O’Connor, who was central to serious findings in the Moriarty tribunal, had actually negotiated his 2007 settlement with the Revenue.
Lowry has told us none of the material taken during the raid was significant, that he did not know why Revenue got a warrant to raid his house. He said he had not received a tax bill, had not been in negotiations with Revenue and was in possession of a tax clearance certificate for himself and his business.
It has to be said he is brilliant at muddying the waters. Why would he have received a tax bill before Revenue conducted its investigations? Why would Revenue be in negotiations with him if it has not yet raised an assessment? Tax clearance certificates are given annually. Let’s see if he gets the next one when it is due because there is sufficient information in the public domain to more than justify another investigation into his financial affairs.
Earlier this year the Sunday Independent published tapes of phone conversations between him and a so-called “land agent” called Kevin Phelan. These were taped in September 2004 at a time when Lowry was under investigation by the Moriarty tribunal. He is heard say he had not declared income to the taxman and that he wanted information withheld from the tribunal.
Lowry had told the tribunal about a payment of €65,000 to Phelan over a land deal in the UK. The tapes suggested an additional undisclosed £248,264 payment had been made to Phelan in August 2002, possibly through his Tipperary refrigeration firm, Garuda.
The taped phone conversation ran to 12 minutes and 42 seconds. Lowry can be described as animated on the tape and his use of language might be called “industrial” given the frequency with which the “f word” is used, although he seems somewhat confused as to exactly how much money he gave Phelan. “Now, the €200 — the €250 — that I gave you, I paid that directly. I never put that through my books or my account or anything. Nobody’s going to fucking get it,” Lowry said on the tape.
The Moriarty Tribunal said the £65,000 fees paid to Phelan were made “for the principal purpose of presenting a contrived falsehood to the tribunal”. What would the tribunal have said had it known about the alleged additional payment?
It may be too late for the tribunal to investigate but not for Revenue. It would be a very naïve Revenue that would have arranged to visit his home by appointment.
Lowry says he is, yet again, a victim of outrageous treatment by an agent of the State. This is exactly the tactic he used to denigrate the Moriarty tribunal at every hand’s turn. That tribunal found Lowry had received large payments from businessman Denis O’Brien in the 1990s and had exercised “insidious and pervasive” influence on the competition for State’s second mobile phone licence.
The report also found that Lowry, when minister, interfered in a rent arbitration process in an attempt to secure a benefit for Ben Dunne. He, of course, was the man who had paid for £395,000 worth of building work at the house the Revenue raided last week, money which passed through the books of Dunnes Stores as a way of evading tax.
LOWRY claimed after the publication of Moriarty that “they tortured me in the process and now they come up with a limp report which is not based on facts and which would not stand up in any court of law.” However he didn’t challenge the findings in court.
Last year Conor Ryan, in this newspaper, revealed Lowry had failed to declare to the Dáil, in his register of interests for 2011, part ownership of a property in England, some 25 acres that he shares with Tipperary businessman Liam Carroll.
Under rules based on the Ethics in Public Office Acts, TDs are obliged to register ownership of any property, other than their family home and any holiday home, as long as it has a value of more than €13,000.
Lowry had his excuses ready quickly. The land, he claimed, is worthless, because it has no planning permission for development and is landlocked. He said he will only declare it, if it is rezoned and has value to realise.
As I’ve written here before, this all matters because Michael Lowry is elected to represent the public’s interests, not his own. He is supposed to adhere to the same rules as all other public representatives, to give us confidence that his actions are transparent and honest.
I imagine the Revenue Commissioners must have had good reason to raid his home. Time will tell what they found.
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