Delaney cheque in spotlight
THE Mazars Report into the financial irregularities at the FAI has revealed that a request from Dundalk FC for money owed to them for their participation in the Europa League in 2016 led to former CEO John Delaney writing a personal cheque of €100,000 to the association.
News of Delaney’s contribution to the association was revealed by The Sunday Times last March. In the wake of that accountancy firm Mazars were commissioned to carry out an independent and in-depth external review with their preliminary findings reported on in The Sunday Times this weekend.
Among the findings of the Mazars report is that financial issues in the FAI were precipitated by demands from Dundalk FC for hundreds of thousands of euros in Uefa prize money which had been withheld.
Dundalk were believed to have been on the verge of issuing a public statement about the money. This prompted Delaney to write a €100,000 cheque to the football body, allowing payments to Dundalk to be made without the FAI exceeding its €1.5m overdraft.
“The investigation found that the association drawdown of the €100,000 cheque advanced by the former chief executive was primarily triggered by the need to meet a payment request from Dundalk FC,” the report says.
The cheque was written by Delaney in April 2017 but only came publicly to light last March.
The Mazars report says: “The investigation found no evidence that the transaction was disclosed by the former chief to the financial committee or the financial audit committee in 2017 or at any time prior to the publication of the media reports appearing in March 2019. As the former chief did not attend for interview, the investigators were unable to question him regarding this transaction.”
At one point Dundalk was owed about €2.2m in prize money after participating in the group stages of the Europa League. The money was channelled from Uefa through the FAI.
John Delaney wrote the FAI a €100,000 cheque to cover its liabilities temporarily.
Neither Delaney nor former FAI honorary secretary Michael Cody spoke to Mazars, which ran its investigation in tandem with those by the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE) and the Sport Ireland-commissioned Kosi report.