Letter 'fully exonerates' Lowry

A barrister acting for the former Fine Gael minister, Mr Michael Lowry, said a letter that has recently come to light "completely exonerates" his client from any implication that he accelerated the 1995 competition that led to Esat Digifone being awarded the State's second mobile phone licence.

Mr Roderic O'Hanlon SC, for Mr Lowry, said the letter, produced two weeks ago by the tribunal, should be seen as exonerating Mr Lowry.

Written on September 14th, 1995, the letter set out a timetable for the competition, and this was adhered to. The tribunal has questioned witnesses about the possibility that an intervention by Mr Lowry in early October 1995 led to the acceleration of the process at a time when Esat Digifone's was the top-ranked bid in the competition.

Mr O'Hanlon said these witnesses, most of whom were civil servants involved in assessing the bids received for the licence, had been examined in the context of a presumption that there had been some form of acceleration of the process and that the minister had been in some way involved.

The fact that the timetable set out in the letter had not been put to the witnesses tainted the evidence. The letter, from the civil servant chairing the assessment team to a Danish consultant, had been written before any involvement of Mr Lowry, and so "completely exonerates the minister".

Mr O'Hanlon said the reference to the minister wanting to have the process accelerated appeared in one of the memos examined by the tribunal, but the person who wrote it could not say exactly what it meant. It was not clear, he said, whether the acceleration referred to the making of a decision as to the winner of the competition process, or the announcement of the result of the process.

The transcripts of the relevant hearings indicated there was ambiguity as to what was meant by the term "process". He said there was no ambiguity about the fact that the letter should have been put to the witnesses.

Mr O'Hanlon said he would like to be associated with comments concerning the discovery of the letter that had been made two weeks ago by counsel for Telenor and Mr Denis O'Brien. (On the day in question Mr Lowry was not represented by counsel).

The chairman, Mr Justice Moriarty, said he had already indicated he would give the letter "all appropriate weight" in the context of this aspect of the tribunal's inquiries. "I will not neglect what you have said," he said.

Meanwhile, a member of the competition assessment team, Mr Aidan Ryan, told Ms Jacqueline O'Brien, for the tribunal, that it was his memory that there were no reservations within the team as to the result of the competition. The result had not changed between the receipt of the first draft final report, on October 3rd, 1995, and the announcement of the result on October 25th, 1995.