No evidence to indicate Lowry 'interfered' with licence contest

There has been no evidence produced to date to indicate Mr Michael Lowry interfered with the deliberations of the committee that selected the winner of the 1995 second mobile phone licence competition, the chairman of the Moriarty tribunal said yesterday.

Mr Justice Moriarty made the observation after Mr Eoin McGonigal SC, for Mr Denis O'Brien, questioned why the tribunal was hearing evidence about the deliberations of the committee.

Mr McGonigal asked if the tribunal was suggesting that Mr Lowry had acted improperly in relation to the committee process "because if not then I don't understand the relevance of these questions".

Mr Justice Moriarty said the facts about the competition process were merely being inquired into and that no aspect of the licence competition could be isolated from other aspects being inquired into. He said there was no suggestion from any evidence heard that what Mr McGonigal had referred to had occurred.

On Tuesday, Wednesday and again yesterday, the tribunal heard tapes of meetings between the committee and the three most successful of the six bids received for the licence. The three top bids were from Esat Digifone, Persona, and Mobicall.

Following the nine hours of tapes, Mr Martin Brennan, chairman of the committee that selected Digifone as the winner, was asked by Mr Jerry Healy SC, for the tribunal, why a statement from Mr O'Brien on a funding agreement with Advent International was not followed up. A copy of the agreement could have been sought. Mr Healy said that if it had been, the committee might have "tumbled" onto the fact that Mr O'Brien was in the process of replacing Advent.

Mr Brennan said that was a reasonable proposition "seven years on". He said that if it was being suggested that the committee consciously discriminated between different bidders "then all I can say is that that never happened".

Mr Healy said he was not suggesting that conscious discrimination had occurred but was simply looking at whether different approaches were taken in relation to different applicants "unconsciously" and whether the Digifone consortium won "because of an unconscious and in no way illegal" difference in approach towards the various candidates.

It would be unfair to Mr Lowry, he said, if this matter was not inquired into.

Mr Healy said that if the committee had sought a copy of the agreement with Advent which Mr O'Brien had mentioned during the meeting, then it might have been discovered that Advent's right to make a 5 per cent investment in Digifone was being disputed by Mr O'Brien. Mr Brennan said this "was a reasonable thing for you to say now."