O'Brien 'victim of fit-up if telling inquiry the truth'

If Mr Denis O'Brien is telling the truth about the Telenor donation, he has been the victim of a "complete and utter fit-up", counsel for the Moriarty tribunal has told him.

Mr John Coughlan SC said the starkly contradictory evidence given about the $50,000 donation by the former ESAT chairman on the one hand, and a number of Telenor witnesses on the other, meant that "the lines are clearly drawn: someone is telling lies".

Mr O'Brien accepted there was a "strong disagreement" between his account and theirs.

But Mr Coughlan put it to him that it was "stronger than that".

If he was telling the truth, he had been the focus of an "appalling fit-up by Telenor".

Mr O'Brien rejected "absolutely" evidence given by two executives of the Norwegian company that he had been shown an invoice and letter from the late Fine Gael fun-raiser, Mr David Austin, at an Esat board meeting in December 1995. The incident "never took place", he said.

Asked about a phone call to Oslo which a third executive says he made soon afterwards, in which he allegedly said he did not want Mr Austin's name "associated with anything in Dublin", he replied: "absolutely no".

There was no need to preface his comments by saying this was to the best of his recollection, he added.

He "definitely did not" make any such phone call.

Mr O'Brien agreed with counsel that the competing accounts of events were "black and white".

Asked if he knew any reasons why the Norwegian businessmen would give "false testimony", he suggested there were two, "both human nature".

Firstly, the company had failed in a hostile bid to take over Esat; secondly, he guessed that "back home in Norway they weren't full and frank about the donation to Fine Gael".

The inquiry also heard that a US-based stockbroker who hand-led the transfer of $294,000 in shares from the account of Mr Austin to Mr O'Brien's father-in-law, Mr Noel Walshe, would not be giving evidence to the tribunal despite invitations to do so.

Mr O'Brien said he asked the broker, Mr Peter Muldowney, to buy shares for Mr Walshe.

But a mistake was made and 12,000 shares intended for Mr Walshe had ended up in Mr Austin's account.

Mr O'Brien said he pointed out the error to Mr Muldowney and it had been rectified.

Mr O'Brien agreed with a suggestion that the confusion might have arisen when Mr Austin's name was mentioned in the original conversation, perhaps in an inquiry about the latter's health.

Mr Coughlan asked if in previous dealings Mr O'Brien had "ever had a mistake like this made, where somebody was inquiring of a man's health and ended up buying shares in his account when the instruction was given to buy for somebody else?"

Mr O'Brien said such an mistake might have happened but had not been brought to his attention.

It was a "strange coincidence", Mr Coughlan suggested, that Mr Austin should be again involved in what were "unusual circumstances".

From the tribunal's viewpoint, it might be wondered if the transaction had been intended to benefit Mr Austin, "but because of his impending demise" and "the attentions of the inland revenue" the shares had to be brought back.

Mr O'Brien said there was "absolutely never any intention" that Mr Austin would benefit.