by Sam McBride
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In the 97 years from the creation of Northern Ireland, the RHI Inquiry was the most forensic examination of how Stormont governed, turning over rocks which in some cases had lain undisturbed for decades. Unlike the Republic of Ireland, where there had been major public inquiries into political scandals, there had never been anything comparable north of the border. Lord Saville’s public inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday had been a mammoth undertaking, but it had been a discrete investigation into the events of a single day of the Troubles rather than into the governance of Northern Ireland. It was a brutal experience for the DUP and the Northern Ireland Civil Service in particular. But, like painful surgery, the inquiry’s work exposed multiple governance deficiencies which, if left untreated, would only become more dangerous. A government as systemically dysfunctional as that exposed by the inquiry was always going to implode at some point, no matter how much spin or money or blind eyes were deployed.
The powerful elite, which under devolution had come to dominate Stormont, could scarcely have imagined that they would ever face such scrutiny. Many senior DUP and Sinn Féin figures kept key communications off-grid, using private phones, non-departmental email accounts and modern forms of communication such as WhatsApp which – even in the event of a major scandal where they were questioned – they could expect would never see the light of day. It was Coghlin’s willingness to use the sweeping powers of compulsion at his disposal which led to him seizing a vast volume of ‘private’ communications about government business.
Four days after the establishment of the public inquiry in January 2017 and amid publicity about its sweeping powers to compel private documentation, former DUP spad John Robinson sent a text message to Crawford which said: ‘Ok. Will delete everything else?’ When asked what he was deleting, Robinson told the inquiry that Crawford had sent him new contact details and he was deleting his old email address and phone number. When asked if he was deleting messages, he said: ‘No, nothing of that nature at all.’
The inquiry ultimately amassed 1.5 million pages of evidence. The private emails and messages provided an unprecedented insight into how the modern DUP and Sinn Féin – parties which value privacy and discipline – governed. Without that private information, which had been kept off government servers and out of departmental filing systems, most of those parties’ senior figures would have emerged with their true roles in the scandal unrevealed. That was a lesson for a weak civil service which had allowed ministers and spads to use private forms of communication and evade record-keeping. Even if some of them did not care about the truth being recorded, pure self-interest ought to have caused them to realise that if they were the only ones whose actions were recorded then when something went wrong, ministers and spads could wash their hands of it – leaving it in the laps of officials.
Overall, the BBC’s Macauley was impressed by the inquiry’s diligence. But what will be its impact? ‘If it changed the system of government to be more accountable and more transparent, that would be public money well spent. But if the report sits on a shelf and becomes just well-meaning words, people will feel cheated.’ At the time of writing, more than two years after Coghlin’s appointment, he was finalising his report. From the outset, Patrick Butler, as solicitor to the inquiry, had been its beating heart. But as the inquiry drew to a close he made a move which – although entirely within the rules – raised eyebrows in Stormont among some of those who heard of it.
In summer 2019, as the inquiry was finalising its report and preparing right of reply letters to those it would criticise, Butler took up a high-level post advising the department most centrally involved in RHI – the Department for the Economy (DfE). For half of the week he was working in the inquiry and for the remainder he was in Stormont, acting as a senior legal adviser to DfE. The move was not announced by the inquiry but was confirmed by it in response to questions after a source contacted the author. As with several members of the inquiry’s staff, Butler was a civil servant – working as a lawyer in the Departmental Solicitor’s Office (DSO) – who had been seconded to the inquiry for its duration.
The inquiry said that Butler had been a staff member of the DSO throughout, in the same manner as with the public inquiry into historical institutional abuse, and
the inquiry chairman and the departmental solicitor were aware of this from the outset and were satisfied that robust measures were put in place to address any possible concerns about an actual, or perceived, conflict of interest. Ethical walls have been put in place to avoid any such conflict. Patrick Butler has not worked on any RHI-related work in his new role with the DSO.
The Department of Finance, within which the DSO sits, said that Butler had been appointed ‘on a temporary and part-time basis, to a legal advisory post which deals with DfE’ but that the role was ‘completely separate from RHI and energy related matters. This is a temporary appointment which was filled internally and was offered to lawyers in the Departmental Solicitor’s Office, the Crown Solicitor’s Office and the Department of Justice. Robust mechanisms have been put in place to avoid any potential or perceived conflict of interest’.
But even without being involved in anything RHI-related, the idea that a critical figure in the multi-million-pound inquiry investigating a departmental disaster would move to work for that department before the inquiry had even finished was problematic, at least in public relations terms. One civil servant said: ‘In terms of how it’s perceived, it doesn’t look good. There’s a lot of talk about it within the civil service.’
An inquiry of this scale was never going to be cheap. As well as paying the bill for the inquiry staff, taxpayers funded the vast majority of the lawyers working for those who gave evidence to the inquiry. Even those who had long left government had their legal costs covered by Stormont departments or public bodies, under the principle that if they incurred legal costs as part of their work then those should be paid by their employer. Lawyers funded in this way quickly racked up huge bills. Senior counsel were paid £200 an hour, junior counsel or a solicitor advocate were paid £100 an hour, a solicitor (partner) was paid £146 an hour, a solicitor (assistant) was paid £130 an hour and a paralegal or trainee solicitor was paid £65 an hour.
By the end of the inquiry’s hearings, four Stormont departments and other public bodies had spent £5.6 million on legal representation for those coming before the inquiry who were linked to departments. In fact, the cost of the inquiry to Stormont was much higher because the Department of Finance said it had made no record – or even estimate – of the vast amounts of time required by serving civil servants to respond to inquiry questions. By May 2019, Ofgem had spent £2.2 million on the inquiry, made up of legal fees, travel, staff to search through 1.5 million documents and examining material disclosed to it by the inquiry. With the inquiry itself costing in the region of £6 million, and allowing for other smaller public sector costs, the entire inquiry process cost taxpayers more than £14 million. It was a lot of money, on top of what had already been wasted on RHI. But it was only through the laboriously detailed work of the inquiry that one of the major revelations emerged – that many of those who seemed to be making a fortune from RHI were not necessarily in fact the ultimate beneficiaries.
CHAPTER 22
TOO BIG TO FAIL
What if RHI was not an accident? Ever since the scandal broke, there has been a widespread belief, based on flimsy evidence, that the scheme was deliberately designed without cost controls to enrich individuals close to the DUP. But what if that was at most a mere side benefit? What if the real reason either for stripping out cost controls at the outset, or for delaying their introduction, was not to funnel a few hundred thousand pounds to those with boilers but to divert hundreds of millions of pounds to a multinational corporation?
In Stormont, which consciously did not keep records of many even mildly embarrassing issues, an obviously improper decision would be kept off every departmental filing system
. Word of mouth would be used. Phone calls in corridors or quickly deleted text messages on private phones would convey the truth not recorded for the public – or the courts – to see. As with so many elements of this story, the official record, which ought to be a bulwark against outlandish allegations, was so distorted under the DUP and Sinn Féin that the absence of something from departmental papers is almost meaningless in attempting to disprove a concern.
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If you live in the UK or Ireland and eat chicken, you’ve almost certainly eaten gargantuan quantities of Moy Park chicken – even though it is unlikely to have been labelled as such. An industrial behemoth, which at any one time has about 40 million chickens and kills six million of them every week, it grew from a small family farm in the County Tyrone village of Moygashel to a position of unrivalled domination within Northern Ireland’s agri-food industry.
As a monopsony, Moy Park had by the time of RHI come to be the only significant buyer of poultry in Northern Ireland, having swallowed up or put out of business every major rival. Its customers included each of the ten largest supermarkets in the UK – including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, M&S, Waitrose, Morrisons, Aldi and Lidl – as well as major retailers in continental Europe, including Carrefour and Picard, and an exclusive licence to make Jamie Oliver branded, ready-to-cook poultry meals in the UK. Even if you avoided all of those and instead went for some basic sustenance in McDonalds or KFC, there is a good chance that you would be sinking your teeth into a product Moy Park made.
The company, which also had plants in GB, estimated that it was the second-largest poultry producer in the entire UK and that it supplied 50% of the entire UK ‘chilled fresh coated market’ – items such as chicken nuggets. It now turns over £1.5 billion every year. The company has expanded rapidly and that expansion was facilitated by RHI, making huge profits for its owners many thousands of miles away. The company had been owned by Chicago-based OSI group and then was sold to Brazil’s Marfrig in 2008 in a $680 million deal. But within just seven years, Moy Park’s valuation more than doubled. In September 2015 – as Moy Park’s farmers were piling into RHI, the company was sold to another Brazilian meat giant, JBS. Less than a year later, bribery charges – unconnected to the Moy Park sale – would begin to be levelled at senior JBS figures in a massive scandal which would shake Brazilian society.
Described by Forbes as ‘the beast of Brazilian beef, beating out competitors Marfrig and Bertin thanks to government favors’, JBS was engaged in corruption on an industrial scale. Moy Park has always said that it had no role in the scandal. Then, two years after it bought Moy Park, JBS sold it – but to a company which is 78% owned by JBS, Pilgrim’s Pride, for about $1 billion.
In 2013, the year after RHI’s launch, Foster and Crawford travelled to Brazil on a trade mission. One of the major engagements was with Marfrig. Briefing notes obtained by the author show that on the night of 23 May, Foster had been due to dine with Marfrig executives at the Michelin starred Mani Manioca, one of Sao Paulo’s hippest restaurants. According to Foster’s briefing material, she was to conduct the key meeting – unusually – without her civil servants. It was the only event on the entire trade mission where one of Foster’s officials or an official from the British consulate did not accompany the minister. Only Crawford and Invest NI chief executive Alastair Hamilton, a former DUP spad, were to be present. The unusual situation was justified on the basis that it was ‘to ensure that the two Marfrig representatives aren’t overwhelmed’.
The purpose of the meeting was ‘to further discuss Marfrig’s presence in Northern Ireland’. The following year, Brazil hosted the football World Cup and Marfrig was a major sponsor and decided that Moy Park’s logo would be prominently displayed on advertising hoardings at the tournament amid rumours that it was planning to float the company on the stock market.
When asked questions about the meeting, Foster and Crawford replied with a solicitor’s letter which did not answer the questions but threatened to sue for libel. The letter also said that the meeting had been shifted from dinner to breakfast and that the DUP figures ‘did not meet with Marfrig executives without officials present in order to ensure there was no minute of the meeting’. The letter added that a translator had been present, although it would not be the role of a translator to record a civil service minute of what transpired.
The year after Foster travelled to Brazil, Marfrig chief executive Sergio Rial said the company had ‘ongoing, positive engagement with the Northern Ireland Executive and have experienced a very pro-business attitude’. It was quite an understatement. With Northern Ireland slow to emerge from the global recession, and Stormont desperate for good news, Moy Park knew that it had the devolved administration at its mercy. In a 2014 interview with Farmers Weekly, Moy Park director of agriculture Alan Gibson suggested that the company’s financial clout meant that Stormont had to help it get around environmental laws. When asked how the company could get around environmental legislation which on paper meant that it could not expand, Gibson said: ‘It won’t be a roadblock to Moy Park expanding in [Northern] Ireland, though. Everybody politically within Northern Ireland understands; a core part of the country’s economy is the agri-food sector … the expansion and intention to build 400 houses is a great incentive [to Stormont] to find a solution.’
Invest NI was offering payments of £9.5 million to Moy Park towards the cost of its expansion, having already given it £5 million in 2010 to upgrade its Ballymena plant. Invest NI decided that farmers could only get public funds from a £35 million Stormont loan scheme to help the poultry industry if they had a contract with Moy Park. But RHI was one of several government measures about to turbocharge Moy Park’s profitability without anywhere appearing on a government document as a direct subsidy.
Moy Park was being bought and sold by some of the world’s biggest industrial food companies. They wanted to expand and squeeze more profit out of their new acquisition. But they had a problem. Northern Ireland, with a far larger agricultural sector than the rest of the UK, was already in breach of EU environmental directives, including the Nitrates Directive, which protects water quality. Poultry litter – containing everything from chicken dung to feathers and birds, which die in the crammed houses – was loaded with nitrates and spreading it on fields was polluting rivers. Expansion was out of the question.
Moy Park came up with a plan. It would build an incinerator to burn the poultry litter. But it was immediately controversial. The proposed site of the incinerator was beside Lough Neagh, the largest freshwater lake in the British Isles, which supplied almost half of Northern Ireland’s drinking water and the plan provoked widespread opposition. The proposal was put forward by a company called Rose Energy. But Moy Park was its majority shareholder – and the main beneficiary if the incinerator got approval. In August 2010, the then DUP Environment Minister, Edwin Poots, announced his intention to give it planning permission. However, the following year Poots was replaced by the SDLP’s Alex Attwood and he rejected the application.
The DUP had been stridently in favour of the plan and some of that had been seen publicly. At one point, Sinn Féin tabled an Assembly motion calling for a public inquiry into the proposal. Even though the motion would just have led to a debate in the Assembly and would not in itself have instigated such an inquiry, the DUP used the nuclear option at its disposal – the petition of concern veto mechanism – to block it. But behind the scenes some senior DUP figures were leaning heavily on public servants in an attempt to clear the way for what Moy Park wanted. In 2009, celebrity chef Michael Deane was a member of the board of the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, and he spoke out forcefully against the proposed incinerator. The restaurateur said he was concerned about the impact on tourism and the effect of emissions on farmland:
This is a beautiful location, every bit as vital to our tourism offering as the Lake District is to the north of England or Loch Ness to Scotland. There would be a public outcry if an incinerator
was even considered in those areas. This proposal should be flatly rejected by the Planning Department or at the very least a public inquiry should be granted. I will give whatever support I can to ensure that this monster is never built in this location.
But Crawford was furious. In an interview for this book, Alan Clarke, who at that point was chief executive of the Northern Ireland Tourist Board, has spoken for the first time about what went on. He said that ‘Andrew went mad’. Crawford, he said, had told Howard Hastings, who was chairman of the tourist board, ‘to rein Michael in’. Crawford was ‘right over the Tourist Board making any comment on the planning application – which is our right to do as the Tourist Board because we’re there to look after tourism’, Clarke said. The tourist board was legally an ‘arm’s length body’ but in dealing with Crawford, Clarke said that it had been ‘arms’ length with an arm round your neck’.
Crawford’s links to Moy Park manifested themselves in myriad situations. Clarke recalled how when in early 2014 it was announced that the Irish Open would the following year be coming to Royal County Down it was Crawford who informed him that Moy Park would be sponsoring it. ‘Moy Park sponsorship came out of thin air on that one,’ he said. ‘Normally you would go chasing the sponsor. They came chasing us … Andrew said “Moy Park will want to sponsor this.”’ When contacted for this book, Crawford declined to answer questions about this and other episodes. Instead he replied with a solicitor’s letter which claimed that what had been put to him was ‘replete with inaccuracies and defamatory content’. The letter did not specify anything which was actually inaccurate but threatened that ‘in the event that publication of inaccurate and defamatory material occurs our clients are fully prepared to issue appropriate legal proceedings’.
