PHIL FLYNN, the former Irish government troubleshooter, planned to invest €20m turning a former Soviet military base in Bulgaria into a luxury hotel and shopping complex, a Channel 4 documentary will claim this week.

The Dispatches programme, which investigated the aftermath of the IRA’s Northern Bank robbery last December, will say that Flynn and Ted Cunningham of Chesterton Finance met with a series of lawyers, accountants and developers in Bulgaria to discuss the investment during a business trip last January.

Kevin Toolis, the journalist who made the documentary, said: “They were intending to spend €20m on a Bulgarian allotment plot in Plovdiv. They met developers and looked at the plans.”

Toolis said Flynn, then Irish chairman of the Bank of Scotland, flashed his bank business card during these meetings, leading the Bulgarian businessmen to believe he was investing the money on its behalf. The Bank of Scotland (Ireland) said this was not the case.

But in an interview with The Sunday Times yesterday, Flynn denied the main points of the Channel 4 documentary. He said he was not involved in a €20m investment, and that he had not led people to believe he was representing the Bank of Scotland when he handed out business cards.

“Our legal adviser was present in all of the meetings in Bulgaria and they weren’t business meetings; they were people doing presentations for us,” he said.

“And I didn’t have any business cards then. I did on one or two other occasions give people my Bank of Scotland card because my phone numbers were on that but I didn’t at any stage represent or purport to represent myself as Bank of Scotland.

“So if anything of that nature is being suggested, then there will be a fallout.”

Dimitar Yazov, a Bulgarian developer, and his son, have told Channel 4 that they held discussions with Flynn and Cunningham about building a trading centre and shopping complex in Plovdiv, the country’s second-largest city.

The site, which is being used for allotments, was to be turned into 160 apartments, a hotel and a retail mall.

Yazov said: “They (Flynn and Cunningham) said, ‘Well, €20m is a lot of money, but the project is very good. We will arrange this money’.”

Toolis claims another €1m investment was discussed by the Irish pair in Sofia. They stayed in the elegant Crystal Palace hotel as they met with Bulgarian contacts, and £30,000 (€44,200) was transferred to a Bulgarian lawyer to set up three property companies.

The Bulgarian property deals fell apart following a series of garda raids in connection with the Northern Bank robbery last February. Officers from the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) searched Flynn’s home and his office in Harcourt Street, Dublin, after it emerged he had travelled to Bulgaria with Cunningham. About £2.3m (€3.3m) in sterling notes was discovered in a wheelie bin in Cunningham’s garden at his home in Farran, Co Cork.

Flynn became a director of Chesterton last year in return for a 10% stake, and brought in his brother James as a financial broker. James Flynn’s property in Louth was also raided by gardai in February.

Phil Flynn, who had been overseeing the Irish government’s decentralisation programme, resigned almost all his public positions after the garda raids. He stood down as chairman of the Bank of Scotland (Ireland) in February.

The former Sinn Fein vice president has repeatedly denied any involvement in IRA money laundering. He is facing firearms charges after CAB officers discovered a small gun in his Dublin office during their raid. He is due to appear in court in October.

In an interview for the Channel 4 documentary Michael McDowell, the justice minister, says the Northern Bank raid was a sophisticated assault on democracy. He believes the IRA still has 80% of the £26m fund stolen.

“There are 10 times as many people living in Britain as on the entire island of Ireland,” said McDowell. “If you multiply the stolen £26m by that kind of factor, to £260m, you’ll get some sense of how this would feel in Britain. Imagine, for instance, if the British National party stole £200m. It would have a very, very serious destabilising effect on the democratic process.”

The Big Heist is on Channel 4 at 9pm on Thursday.

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