Mick Wallace promises more dirt on Nama today if he’s called during question time in the Dáil. It’s his way of showing that the Public Accounts Committee inquiry there is going nowhere. Nor is the one at Stormont.
As Wallace said, the Dáil PAC ‘just does not have the ability or the mechanisms to conduct through investigations’. He added: ``We need an independent inquiry that is comprehensive and forensic, something that looks into the general operations of Nama.''
Martin McGuinness appears to agree with him. He has said a judicial inquiry might be needed but his was a half-hearted plea. McGuinness knows that if the Dáil PAC is going nowhere, the Stormont one chaired by Sinn Féin’s Daithí McKay is a non-starter. Do the members of both committees not see how ridiculous it is to be operating in parallel not knowing what the other is doing, not knowing what the other knows or doesn’t know, or doesn’t even know to ask about? Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns’ wouldn’t be in it.
For example, we know of at least two meetings between DUP ministers and parties interested in buying the north’s Nama portfolio. They appear to have been on a solo run. We don’t know to what extent if at all they falsely claimed to be acting on behalf of the Stormont executive even though Martin McGuinness hadn’t been informed. We also know that the meetings weren’t in the official diary. However we don’t know if any other meetings took place, who was present or what transpired.
We know that at the time of the proposed Pimco deal there was to be a three-way split of £15 million to the fixers. Yet when it came to the Cerberus deal we only know of £7 million spirited away to the Isle of Man. Why was it so much less? Was it so much less, or are £8 million floating about somewhere or in other accounts?
Now imagine trying to find answers to any of that on a Stormont committee given the DUP’s record in blocking any inquiries into McCausland’s shenanigans with the Housing Executive. One ‘known’ is Sammy Wilson’s contempt for the committee, his fellow MLAs and all procedures for ensuring parliamentary behaviour. Now if that was how the DUP behaved when the committee was dealing with a sprat, what would they be like if Daithí McKay hooked a mackerel?
A good starting point to see the problem might be to go back over some of the material from the inquiry into the Red Sky imbroglio and the curious relationship between the DUP and Red Sky and Frank Cushnahan. The redoubtable Jim Allister, yer only man, managed to elicit the following snippet of information, namely that Red Sky which had been overcharging the Housing Executive for maintenance work managed to negotiate the excessive charge down from £260,000 to £20,000. Who was doing the negotiating? None other than said Mr Cushnahan. What was wrong with that? Well said Mr Cushnahan had also been a member of the Housing Executive’s audit committee. Stormont’s PAC concluded in its report that Cushnahan’s involvement in the negotiations was ‘totally unethical and could and should have been avoided’.
Two points arise. First, no matter how damaging the conclusions a Stormont committee reaches nothing ever happens. People criticised simply motor blithely on. Each committee is party political. Any attempt to censure a Stormont minister is blocked by abuse of the petition of concern.
Secondly, in the present instance the involvement of the National Crime Agency will bring all investigations to a shuddering halt. Any public testimony at a committee would prejudice a police investigation. In short the so-called inquiry at Stormont is a dead duck. There’s no danger of the NCA producing anything before next year as they trawl through records going back to 2013.
In the absence of a public judicial inquiry (which the DUP would never agree to) we’ll have to rely on allegations from Mick Wallace and the blundering Dáil PAC inquiry which many people believe are being driven by debtors who feel harshly treated by Nama.
These people aren’t going away, not when they see their investment bought for a song by Cerberus while they have to continue to pay off the loans they took out.
