O'Brien criticised over delay in disclosing bank account

Businessman Mr Denis O'Brien has been criticised by the Moriarty tribunal for not revealing the existence of an Isle of Man bank account until asked about it by the tribunal.

The account, which was opened with a deposit of more than £400,000, was closed less than two weeks after the money had been "dispersed", Mr O'Brien said.

He said he had not known, until the matter was checked by his accountants recently, that the account had been used for the purchase of a £150,000 sterling townhouse in Spain in July 1996.

The house was bought from the late Mr David Austin. In October 1996 Mr Austin transferred the bulk of the money to an account belonging to Mr Michael Lowry in the Isle of Man.

Mr O'Brien returned to the witness-box yesterday following his unexpected one-week absence to be with his wife and their new daughter. He is to resume giving evidence today and may be in the witness-box for some days. He is understood to have cleared his diary to July 4th next so as to be available for the tribunal.

Asked by reporters yesterday morning if he had been in Dublin last week, Mr O'Brien said: "I was here on Thursday. My wife got out of hospital on Thursday afternoon. We came back to Dublin to see my mother-in-law and to show her the baby. We were in Dublin for 3-1/2 hours, then we went on to Portugal."

He said he could see absolutely no reason why the tribunal should be annoyed with this. "I said I was spending the week with my family and enjoying my new family and also being with my wife, and I think it's a normal thing to do, for a husband to collect his wife from the hospital and bring her home."

Mrs O'Brien gave birth in a London hospital on Saturday, June 16th. Mr O'Brien is a tax exile and the couple live in Portugal. They travelled from London to Portugal, via Dublin, in their private Gulfstream jet.

Mr O'Brien was asked by Mr John Coughlan SC, for the tribunal, why he had not disclosed the existence of his account with AIB in the Isle of Man to lawyers conducting an investigation for Esat Telecom in 1997.

At the time Esat Telecom was preparing for a launch on the US Nasdaq and lawyers for a number of parties involved were investigating suggestions or suspicions that payments might have been made to Mr Lowry, the minister who awarded the mobile phone licence to Esat Digifone in May 1996.

The lawyers investigated all significant bank accounts belonging to Mr O'Brien of which they had knowledge. Yesterday Mr O'Brien said that the AIB account had only been open for a week or 10 days and that there might have been "lots of closed accounts around the place".

He said he was not aware at the time how interested the lawyers had become in another transaction involving Mr Austin, the $50,000 political donation to Fine Gael.