Bolger Makes Case for Racing Ahead of tomorrow's 2009 Budget, brought forward due to the recession, Jim Bolger made the case for racing in an interview with Marian Finucane on her show last Saturday. As the award-winning broadcaster was concluding a chat in which Bolger had primarily detailed a case he took and won against Allied Irish Bank, the Co. Kilkenny-based trainer said: "I'd like to make a brief reference to the amount of money that the Government puts into racing every year. "The figure is about sixty one million but for that they get twenty thousand people employed, we have exports of two hundred million and we have about sixty thousand visitors per annum who go racing in Ireland. The Punchestown Festival is worth forty million a year and the Galway Festival is worth fifty million a year to their local economies so they get a very good return for the money that they put into racing." Finucane, then suggested to the proud Wexford man, who broke the 2,000 winner barrier back in May, that presumably he would like the Government to remember this come Budget Day, to which he replied, "I would like that yes." Bolger's case against AIB centred on the systematic taking of money from his account over a ten year period. In a time when the interest rate was sixteen per cent, a conversation with a fellow trainer who had been overcharged, led the Coolcullen maestro, born on Christmas Day 1941, to check his statements, which his accountant duly did, finding that he'd actually been charged at rates of twenty one, twenty two and twenty three per cent. In the late 1980s Bolger's account had plenty of turn-over, a big debit balance and he said busy people like him were targeted because they mightn't have the inclination to query the minutiae of interest rates. Over the ten year spell, it was found that he was overcharged to the tune of E100,000. At the High Court in Trim last Tuesday, Bolger disclosed that the case was settled for E340,000. (EM)
