EDUCATION CHIEF USED THE K CLUB FOR STAFF MEETINGS
Gatherings cost €550 every time Board spent €60k on hotels
THE former head of a controversial educational board spent more than €60,000 on hotels in one year, including more than €20,000 at the exclusive K Club where he hosted staff meetings just 2km from his home, the Irish Mail on Sunday can reveal.
Correspondence between the former chief executive of the Kildare and Wicklow Education Training Board and the Department of Education, seen by the MoS, details a litany of spending on lavish hotels, as well as tendering issues and a failure to disclose family ties between the ex-chief executive and a company that won a board contract.
Seán Ashe retired from his role as chief executive of the training board last December, having been in the post, which oversees a budget of €160m, since June 2013. After
an investigation by the Comptroller and Auditor General, the department began its own investigation into the board.
The secretary general of the department, Seán Ó Foghlú, wrote to Mr Ashe, asking why €8,880 was spent on 16 staff meetings at the exclusive K Club in Straffan, Co. Kildare, at a cost of €550 each.
The MoS can reveal that the golf club and hotel is just 2.2km from Mr Ashe’s home.
Another 24 credit card payments, ranging from €19 to €300, were made to the luxury resort. One invoice for €10,450 included a figure of €734 charged at the VAT rate of 23%. The VAT rate for food and accommodation in hotels is 9%.
A K Club spokesperson was unavailable to comment on the board’s use of its facilities.
The MoS asked Mr Ashe about the use of the resort but received no response.
Another €9,814 was spent, in three payments, to the five-star Druids Glen Marriot Hotel and golf resort in Newtownmountkennedy, Co. Wicklow. In total, the training board spent €61,550 on hotels across the country.
Questions have also been raised about Mr Ashe’s family connections to a company called Postbrook, which was allowed to rent a board premises at a reduced rate, as the property was not in a fit state for occupation. However, no rent was collected by the board.
The license agreement with Postbrook, which was unsigned, stated the company ‘would make the property fit for occupation by cleaning up the entire area internally and externally, installing a new fire alarm and security alarm and upgrading all communications in the property to include Wi-Fi’. In return it could use the property for between three and six months, the C&AG found.
However, investigators found that Postbrook was there for about 18 months, from July 2015, and there was no record of rent being paid by it.
The company, which has the trading name Ashten Engineering, employs Michael Ashe, Seán Ashe’s son. It was also awarded a number of tenders from the training board.
Seán Ashe did not disclose the family ties to the company, in his declaration of interest for 2016, but he changed his declaration since the issue was raised by investigators. He said: ‘My son, Michael Ashe, is an employee of Postbrook, is a qualified industrial mechanical installer and has a shareholding in the company and is not a beneficiary. Jennifer Ashe is my daughterin-law. She is an employee of Postbrook and is an alternate director of the company. She has no shareholding in the company and is not a beneficiary. She was appointed in 2016 as an alternate director when a previous director resigned.’
The MoS put it to Seán Ashe that both of these family members were indeed beneficiaries, with his son being an employee and shareholder and his daughter-in-law being a director, with latest company accounts showing directors are in receipt of remuneration. He made no comment on this. The MoS can also reveal that landregistry records for an address in Sallins, given by Jennifer Ashe in her filings to the Companies Registration Office, show that Seán Ashe is the registered owner of that property. If the ownership of the property has changed, Michael and Jennifer Ashe are required to register their own names on it – but there is no time limit on when they would have to do that.
On Friday, Postbrook had a judgment of €11,348 made against it in relation to a case taken by International Plastic Systems Limited, while a more substantial judgment of €57,357 was made against it in December, after a case was taken by Hevac Limited.
Seán Ashe didn’t respond to MoS queries in relation to the arrangement with Postbrook and Ashten Engineering but in correspondence to the department he said there was no conflict of interest in relation to the awarding of contracts and use of training board buildings.
There was no record of rent being paid by the company
‘While there was no conflict of interest, on reflection, there could be a perceived one with the original arrangement and, with hindsight, I should have separated the two events, ie, the rent and the works.
‘I take full responsibility for allowing this to proceed. Even though at the time SOLAS sanctioned the acquisition of the building, no financial provision was made other than that for rent in our authorised budget. Hence, the attractiveness
of the offer by Postbrook to make the building fit for purpose as they had the resource to do so. The ETB [Educational and Training Boards] required the building to be operational as contracted training unit and it was ready for a warehouse operations course.’
The law allows people to create a picture of their signature for official use, called a digital signature, and the investigation found poor practices regarding the use of Seán Ashe’s digital signature, which he claims was not always done by him, and that simply because his name was on documents it didn’t mean he made the relevant decisions.
‘As I acknowledged in my previous response my signature is on some documentation relating to procurement processes. None of these processes involved me in a decision-making position whereby it was utilised to open the “form of tender” and if I was present I declared such by signing the balance sheet. No decisions were made at such meetings.
‘The signing of documentation either by me personally or by an authorised officer using my digital signature was a legacy practice that should have ended after I had delegated authority under our new corporate structure, and the relevant officers should have appended their signatures with sign-off by the COO [chief operating officer] head section. Nobody was conscious of the need to change, and this oversight resulted from a massive uplift in workload for key staff.’
The MoS previously reported that the activities of the Kildare and Wicklow Education Training Board were being referred to the Garda fraud squad on foot of the C&AG report. The investigators also found issues with a number of building projects including a major overspend at Arklow College, with €900,000 having to be paid to Sammon Contracting Ireland Limited (who this week went into examinership), relating to an accelerator fee and other claims.
The department has sought clarification in relation to these fees.
Attempts to contact Michael and Jennifer Ashe were responded to by a third party, who confirmed they were aware of the MoS questions, but would not comment further.