MR Joseph Murphy snr made no secret of the fact that he needed the expertise of Mr James Gog arty if JMSE was to complete its largest contract, worth £20 million, the Flood tribunal heard yesterday. This was despite the extreme anger Mr Murphy felt at the time towards the JMSE chief executive.
Mr Christopher Oakley, solicitor, in his second day of evidence, said Mr Murphy was annoyed that Mr Gogarty had not disclosed the full material value of his settlement negotiations with the ESB over the Money point contract until after his pension agreement had been signed.
The negotiations with the ESB had resulted in a cheque for £700,000, including VAT, being paid to Mr Gerard Sheedy, Mr Gogarty's solicitor.
It had been previously agreed that Mr Gogarty should receive 50 per cent of any settlement figure he negotiated over £40,000, said Mr Oakley, who had been authorised by Mr Murphy to conduct negotiations with Mr Gogarty's legal representatives on the pension settlement.
Neither he nor the JMSE financial director, Mr Roger Copsey, knew the likely outcome of the ESB settlement until after October 3rd, 1989, when the terms of Mr Gogarty's pension plan were agreed, when Mr Sheedy advised that the money was on deposit.
"It led to a great deal of annoyance and anger on my part over what I saw to be misrepresentation and deliberate deceit, aided and abetted by Gerard Sheedy," Mr Oakley said. "It ended up as a formal complaint to the Law Society, at least by me."
It was not until after the signing of the pension agreement, he said, that it emerged that Mr Gogarty had sent an invoice to the ESB the previous month for £560,000 plus £140,000 VAT. The money was paid after the agreement was signed, he said, and lodged by Mr Sheedy in his client's account, "even though the company [JMSE] was not a client of that firm".
Mr Oakley conceded to Mr Brian O'Moore SC, for Mr Gog arty, that he had earlier deliberately linked Mr Gogarty's pension to his provision of an affidavit. The Murphys needed this at the time to challenge allegations made by the former JMSE chief executive, Mr Liam Conroy, in Isle of Man proceedings involving the Murphy Trust. Mr Sheedy had quite properly subsequently pointed out that the two matters were separate, he added.
Even though he subsequently did not need the affidavit as the matter was settled in the Isle of Man, he still pursued it, Mr Oakley said, in preparation for further proceedings. The matter of Mr Conroy's allegations in relation to Mr Murphy's tax affairs were finally re solved when the former JMSE chief executive agreed as part of a settlement of proceedings before the London High Court, that they were at all times "vexatious and frivolous", he said. Earlier, he reacted angrily when the lawyer for the tribunal, Mr Des O'Neill SC, sought to examine him on the contents of affidavits by Mr Murphy snr that he had not been shown previously in the context of the Conroy evidence. "You had these affidavits on exactly the same date as you had the affidavits from Liam Conroy." They could have been to him at the same time, the day before, he insisted.
He had come forward "voluntarily" to give evidence, he reminded the tribunal, and felt that he had been done a grave professional discourtesy. These "intervening" affidavits were important, he said, because they put in context the responses of Mr Murphy to Mr Conroy's allegations concerning tax fraud - on which Mr Oakley had consistently been pressed by the tribunal lawyer.
Mr Murphy's counsel, Mr Dan Herbert SC, also objected on the grounds that the same affidavits were not produced when his client had been examined by the commission under Mr Justice Flood in Guernsey. It transpired that the affidavits sourced from London, were left on a fax machine in Guernsey, and were found after the commission had left.