The award of the State’s second mobile phone licence to Esat Digifone despite the appearance of Dermot Desmond’s IIU Nominees Ltd as a shareholder was not part of “some sinister plot”, the Moriarty tribunal was told today.
A barrister acting for businessman Denis O’Brien asked Fintan Towey, a civil servant involved in the licence award process, if the decision to award the licence despite the appearance of IIU Nominees as a shareholder was “orchastrated by [former minister] Michael Lowry with you being a puppet at the end of the piece of string”.
Mr Towey told Jim O’Callaghan, SC, that this was “absolutely not” the case. “Minister Lowry had no role in the matter.”
Mr Towey was answering questions about legal advice sought by him and the Department of Transport, Energy and Communications when it was first informed in April 1996, that Mr Desmond’s IIU Nominees was to be a shareholder in the Esat consortium in place of the institutions AIB, Bank of Ireland, Standard Life and Advent International, which had been mentioned in the application bid.
Mr Towey said the licence was granted because the legal advice said the appearance of IIU as a shareholder was not an impediment.
He agreed with Rossa Fanning, for Mr Lowry, that it would have been “perverse” and “extraordinary” and could have left the department open to litigation, if Mr Lowry had decided, contrary to the legal advice received and the advice of his civil servants, that he was not going to award the licence to Esat Digifone.
At the time of the licence award Esat Digifone was 40 per cent owned by Mr O’Brien, 40 per cent owned by Norwegian company Telenor, and 20 per cent owned by IIU.
Mr Fanning said the suggestion that Mr Lowry had been seeking to confer a benefit on Mr O’Brien in that context would have been a “fanciful suggestion”. Mr Towey replied: “To my knowledge, yes.”