Lawlor denies attempting to mislead tribunal

Mr Liam Lawlor has begun his defence against accusations he deliberately tried to mislead the Planning Tribunal over the sale of an acre of land adjacent to his Lucan home.

The former Fianna Fáil West Dublin TD has previously served six weeks in prison following three separate cases where he was ruled to have failed to comply with the tribunal.

The tribunal has threatened to take Mr Lawlor to the High Court over what it claims is his failure to disclose all the relevant documentation surrounding the sale of the one acre site in Somerton, Lucan, in November 2001 and what he did with the £690,00 proceeds. The land was sold under the joint names of Mr Lawlor and his wife Hazel to a development company called Maplewood Investments Ltd.

Mr Lawlor submitted two affidavits to the tribunal following an order of discovery from the tribunal in March 2003. The tribunal claims these were incomplete, and today Mr Des O'Neill, SC for the tribunal, accused Mr Lawlor of deliberately trying to block the inquiry into the matter. His sworn evidence was "grossly deficient" and he has "wholly failed" to account for what happened to the proceeds of the sale.

Mr Lawlor rejected the accusation as "totally wrong". He claimed he supplied everything in his possession, apart from documents he believed to be in possession of a Gibraltar solicitors, Haynes and Traise, which he had tried but failed to secure. "Every document that was in my possession was in the original affidavit," the former TD told the tribunal. "If it does not comply, then it's not intentional."

Mr O'Neill again accused Mr Lawlor of being evasive, saying he was "well aware", given past experience, of what was expected of him when served with an order of discovery. It was not good enough, he said, for Mr Lawlor to merely direct the tribunal as to where documents "might" be found.

Mr Lawlor initially claimed that the proceeds of this sale went towards paying off two loans given to him by a Bahamian registered company called Long Water Investments Ltd. He claimed he owed a total of £1.1 million in capital and interest after the company loaned him £500,000 in 1995 and a further £400,000 in 1998.

Mr Lawlor claimed the only condition for this loan was that he further the company's property interests in Eastern Europe, where he had numerous contacts, particularly in the Czech Republic. Mr O'Neill said the tribunal regarded the alleged circumstances behind this loan with "deep scepticism".

Mr Nicholas Morgan, whose family controls the Long Water trust, told the tribunal the money from the sale of the land went directly to Mr Lawlor and his wife, and were not used to pay off the loan.

The tribunal also heard that Mr Lawlor used the codeword "Lucan" to gain access to his account at the Landesbank in Liechtenstein. He failed to reveal this, however, and it took two years for it to come to light.