The lead consultant to the 1995 mobile phone licence competition said he had no difficulty with the former communications minister, Michael Lowry, being told the ranking of the bids prior to the completion of the process.
Giving evidence to the Moriarty tribunal Prof Michael Andersen was asked about a note of a meeting of October 9th, 1995, where the group that was to decide the winner of the competition were to discuss a draft result.
The note records how the chairman of the group, civil servant Martin Brennan, said the minister had been told "the ranking of the top two applicants".
At that stage - following a meeting in Copenhagen on September 28th attended by Mr Brennan, Fintan Towey, Prof Andersen and another Danish consultant - Esat Digifone was in the lead and Persona was second.
Prof Andersen said he had no difficulty in principle with the minister being told and that he had seen this occur in other competitions.
Mr Justice Moriarty said Mr Lowry had been told Esat was in the lead but the project team could have changed the ranking. Prof Andersen said he presumed the civil servant would have qualified his statement to say the final report had not yet been adopted.
John O'Donnell SC, for the departments of communications and finance, said a hypothesis being explored by the tribunal was that Mr Lowry, knowing that his "favoured" applicant was ahead, could have told the civil servants to accelerate the process.
However Prof Andersen said he and his associates were already under pressure to produce their draft and final reports by the dates that had been agreed, and there was no question of the process having been accelerated.
During the meeting in Copenhagen on September 28th, which Prof Andersen said he cannot recall, it is believed letters grading the applications were changed to numbers, at the request of Mr Brennan.
Prof Andersen said he believed this was more a presentational issue and did not affect the ranking of the bids. He said the ranking had already emerged. He was not "fond" of the change but said it did not change the result that emerged from the process. There was no "row" with Mr Brennan about the matter, he said. It was more a discussion.
"It is a way of testing the initial score that was recorded," he said. "It confirmed a result already arrived at." The change did not compromise the evaluation, he said.
Asked about the suggestion implied in some questions from the tribunal that he might have imposed the outcome of the competition on the project group, Prof Andersen said: "That is a strange proposition. I don't understand it. I reject it."
Asked about suggestions the result was arrived at when work still needed to be done, Prof Andersen said there was always more work that could be done. The question was whether it would change the outcome. "If you do not have a deadline things can go on for years and years," he said. "You never said a truer word," responded Mr O'Donnell.