Record Number: 1999 / 163 Cos

THE HIGH COURT

IN THE MATTER OF THE COMPANIES ACTS 1963 to 1990

AND IN THE MATTER OF PART II OF THE COMPANIES ACT 1990 AND SECTIONS 8 AND 17

AND IN THE MATTER OF ANSBACHER (CAYMAN) LIMITED

(formerly GUINNESS MAHON CAYMAN TRUST LIMITED,

ANSBACHER LIMITED and CAYMAN INTERNATIONAL BANK AND TRUST COMPANY LIMITED)

SUPPLEMENTAL AFFIDAVIT OF PETER DURNIN

I, Peter Durnin, of Regus House, Harcourt Road in the City of Dublin, aged 18 years and upwards MAKE OATH and say as follows:

  1. I am an Assistant Principal in the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement. I am also an “officer of the Director” within the meaning of the Company Law Enforcement Act 2001 and, in that capacity, am authorised by the Director of Corporate Enforcement to make this Affidavit on his behalf. Save where otherwise appears I do so from facts within my own knowledge and where so otherwise appearing I believe the same to be true and accurate.
  1. I make this Affidavit supplemental to the Affidavit sworn by me on 28 June 2002 (“the Principal Affidavit”) and I beg to adopt the same abridgments as were used therein, ie,

(a)  ODCE for the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement;

(b)  The Director for the Director of Corporate Enforcement

(c)  Cahills for Cahill Printers Limited.

Difficulties in Transposition / Recovery of the Inspectors’ Report

  1. I say that, in the circumstances which have arisen and which will be further outlined in paragraphs 5 to 10 hereof, I consider it necessary to explain further the difficulties referred to in paragraph 11 of the Principal Affidavit and which resulted in Cahills being unable to use the electronic files furnished by the Inspectors’ Secretariat as the basis from which to immediately start producing published copies of the Report in both electronic and conventional format.

I am informed that the Report (other than the Appendices thereto), as presented to the Court and as stored on the Inspectors’ computer network and exported to the CD-ROM furnished to Cahills, made use of a print-font which was not a so-called “TrueType” font. Fonts are the terms used to describe the different forms in which printed characters may appear in a document. This affidavit, for example, has been mainly printed using the font known as “Times New Roman” whereas the remainder of this sentence is being printed using a font known as “Arial”. I am informed that the ADOBE-Acrobat software system (which is the so-called “platform” required to achieve the electronic publication of the Inspectors’ Report) readily accommodates only TrueType fonts and, accordingly, a large number of characters transferred incorrectly into ADOBE-Acrobat. These had to be individually corrected. In addition the transfer into ADOBE-Acrobat led to numerous instances in which the formatting of the document (eg, the layout of paragraphs or the indentation of text) became inaccurate vis-à-vis the original report. Once again these difficulties had to be individually corrected.

A second problem arose in relation to the files containing the Appendices to the Inspectors’ Report which had been exported onto CD-ROM in so-called “.tif format”. (This is, apparently, one of the principal means by which graphic images can be saved electronically.) I am informed that certain of these files were capable of being “bulk read” by the ADOBE-Acrobat distiller – the software through which non-Acrobat files must first be converted. However, for reasons which remain unclear, the distiller was unable to copy certain other files with the result that they had to be individually opened and dealt with out of sequence either by way of re-scanning or through the reprocessing of the .tif files for manual insertion into the main ADOBE-Acrobat file. Almost 1,000 pages had to be dealt with in this manner. This gave rise to further delays.

  1. I say that, once this process was completed, it was necessary for ODCE staff to proof-read the so-called “.pdf” files into which both the MS-WORD and .tif files furnished by the Inspectors’ Secretariat had been converted following distillation by Cahills. Cahills advised that if any errors were to arise they would most likely manifest themselves as pages in which either the top or bottom line had failed to transfer correctly. Accordingly during the afternoon/evening of Friday 28 June 2002 and during the morning/early-afternoon of Saturday 29 June 2002 ODCE staff, working in pairs, proceeded to verify that no such errors existed. All of this work had one objective, namely to ensure that the copy of the Inspectors’ Report being prepared in electronic form by Cahills would produce an identical copy to that which had earlier been ordered to be printed and published.

Discrepancies between the “hard” and electronic copies sourced from the Inspectors’ Secretariat

  1. I say that at or about 2:30 pm on Saturday 29 June 2002 one of the proof- readers from ODCE detected an altogether different form of discrepancy between the proof-material and the source. On examination, it became evident that in certain aspects the electronic copy of the Inspectors’ Report provided by its Secretariat to Cahills differed from the copy which this Honourable Court had ordered to be printed and published. I am informed that approximately 50 of the .pdf pages carried small annotations which had not appeared on the Report as furnished to the Court and copied to the Director. By way of example, I beg to refer to the original and .pdf version of one of the pages upon which, marked with the letters “PD1”, I have signed my name prior to the swearing hereof. I have highlighted the annotation in yellow.
  1. A representative from the Inspectors’ Secretariat duly attended at Cahills printworks on Saturday afternoon and was able to explain that these annotations represented identifiers which had been placed on the documents by the Inspectors’ Secretariat as they were being scanned on to the Inspectors’ computer network. In the Report as presented to the Court these codes had been electronically redacted with the result that they did not appear in the printed version. It had been understood by the Inspectors’ Secretariat that the codes would be similarly redacted in the files which had been exported onto CD-ROM and which were intended to be the basis of the Report as directed by the Court to be printed and published. However, for reasons unknown to the Inspectors’ Secretariat, this had not occurred.
  1. At first sight these annotations appear trivial but it had a larger significance which was confirmed by the representative from the Inspectors’ Secretariat. Along with the codes, the Inspectors had also redacted certain other elements of documents which appear as appendices to their Report. As I understand it, this was done in certain instances to prevent the inclusion of irrelevant material albeit of an innocuous kind. However, in other instances it was done to protect the privacy of third-parties and the unnecessary disclosure of confidential information which was not germane to the ultimate findings of the Inspectors.
  1. Having regard to this potential risk (however minimal) for inclusion of unintended material in the published version both Cahills and ODCE personnel concluded that it was prudent to commence an entirely new proofing exercise, checking this time for 100% identity between the pdf documents and the paper source: not merely for what one might call the “conventional” potential discrepancies of which we had been advised by Cahills. This exercise commenced at approximately 4 pm on Saturday 29 June 2002 and continued until approximately 6 pm. At that point, only five of the fifteen volumes had been fully checked and cleared for publication by Cahills.
  1. Accordingly at 6 pm on Saturday 29 June 2002 the pdf-proofs for the remaining ten volumes of the Report and the original source materials were transported back to the Director’s offices in Harcourt Road so that the task could resume again on the morning of Sunday 30 June 2002. Some thought was given to whether the task should be continued on Saturday evening but it was recognised that staff had been proof-reading all day and could not be expected to maintain the concentration levels necessary for the proper completion of the task.
  1. Instead the proof-reading resumed at 7:30 am yesterday (Sunday 30 June 2002) and continued during the day. No instances in fact arose of the sort which had been feared, ie, the risk described in paragraph 7 of material appearing in the pdf files which the Inspectors had deliberately excluded from the version presented by them to the Court. However I would respectfully submit that, despite the resulting delay, it was nonetheless proper for the re-proofing exercise to be undertaken just in case such an error might otherwise have appeared in the published report.
  1. I say that it had been our hope to clear the entirety of the Report on Saturday 29 June 2002 for printing and CD-ROM production. As a result of the difficulties which arose the process of publication has been again beset by unanticipated delays. The position at 1 pm today is that Cahills are correcting the discrepancies which were detected between the pdf files and the originals and I am informed that that process should be completed by 8 pm this evening, Monday 1 July 2002. It will then be necessary to proof those corrections and we are hopeful that this should take no longer than two hours. When this process is completed it will then take approximately 24 hours to include hyperlinks in the text (as authorised by this Honourable Court for the purpose of facilitating navigation within the text on the CD-ROM version of the published report) and only then can the files be despatched for actual production of CD-ROMS.
  1. I am informed by Cahills that the printing and production process will take a full four days. On this basis it is envisaged that 400 copies of the printed Report and 1,000 copies of the electronic version will be available no earlier than Friday evening next. On this basis the Director is proposing that, subject to the approval of this Honourable Court, distribution of the published Report should commence from the Government Publications Sales Office at 9:30 am on Saturday next, 6 July 2002. The Government Publications Sales Office is not ordinarily open on Saturday but I am informed that arrangements can be made to have it specially opened for the limited purpose only of distributing the Inspectors’ Report.
  1. I should advise the Court that all of this work has proceeded with the objective of ensuring that the copy to be printed and published is identical in all respects to the Report as presented to the Court. There will remain, in the published version, a small and inconsequential number of instances in which pages or lines have been duplicated, or in which lines are missing at the bottom of pages. This will be an inconvenience for the reader but as they appear in the Report as presented to the Court, they will also appear in the published version.
  1. As the Court will be aware, the Director offered the services of his Office to facilitate the printing and publication of a document which he had no responsibility for preparing in circumstances where the Inspectors had indicated that it would place a very significant burden on their Secretariat and had canvassed the suggestion that the task be assigned to the Courts Service. The difficulties which have arisen have gone well beyond what might be regarded as conventional formatting problems. He wishes the Court to be aware that many of his staff have worked above and beyond the call of duty in identifying, addressing and finding solutions to the discrepancies outlined earlier. He will continue to deploy his staff to ensure the publication of the Report. He wishes the Court to be aware that it is now his view that, in future, Inspectors should assume full responsibility for the task of publishing their own Reports.

SWORN by PETER DURNIN this 1st day of July 2002 at

in the City of Dublin before me, a Commissioner for Oaths/Practising Solicitor, and I know the Deponent.

______

COMMISSIONER FOR OATHS/

PRACTISING SOLICITOR

This Affidavit is filed on the 1st day of July 2002 by Ann Keating of Regus House, Harcourt Road in the City of Dublin, Solicitor for the Director of Corporate Enforcement.