Official denies Lowry role in selection of winner

The civil servant who chaired the team which selected the winner of the second mobile phone licence said he could not see how the tribunal could make a finding that the competition process was interfered with by Mr Michael Lowry.

Mr Martin Brennan said he was standing over the work of the assessment team and agreed with counsel for Mr Lowry that he was effectively staking his professional reputation on the tribunal finding that there had been no interference in the competition.

He told Mr Rossa Fanning BL that he did not accept any suggestion that Mr Lowry had a preferred outcome to the competition. He did not believe Mr Lowry had interfered with the competition or that he could have interfered.

Mr Martin Brennan, in his 19th day in the witness box, was asked by Mr Eoin McGonigal SC, counsel for Mr Denis O'Brien, about various documents which were produced by the project team as it assessed and ranked the six bids for the licence during August, September and October 1995.

Mr Brennan agreed with Mr McGonigal that when the details of work, which had been carried out by various sub-groups of the assessment team, were brought together during a meeting in Copenhagen on Thursday, September 28th, 1995, a result was arrived at. The team was in Copenhagen in the offices of Andersen Management International, the Danish consultants who worked on assessing the bids.

At the end of the meeting the team had identified the top three bids in order of priority and subject to checking. "You did not go to Copenhagen to bring about a particular result?" Mr McGonigal said. "Not at all," said Mr Brennan. When Mr McGonigal said the minister, Mr Lowry, could not have brought about the result because of the way the process of selecting the winner was put in place, Mr Brennan agreed. He said he was absolutely certain that there had been no outside influence on the marking of the various criteria and sub-criteria under which the bids were assessed. The markings had been carried out by different people in different settings.

Asked if the result arrived at during the meeting in Copenhagen could have been changed subsequently, Mr Brennan said he did not think it could have been. Mr Brennan agreed that changing the result would have entailed starting again on the work carried out by the various sub-committees.

"If there was no interference by the minister up to that point, then the result was achieved by the persons delegated to do it and not by any masters of those people," Mr McGonigal said. Mr Brennan replied: "That's correct." When Mr McGonigal said that Esat Digifone came first by reason of the application it had made and the work it had done on that application, Mr Brennan agreed. Asked if he would be "extremely disappointed" if the tribunal was to find otherwise, Mr Brennan said: "I can't see how it could be done, quite honestly."

Mr Brennan said that after the Thursday meeting in Copenhagen he travelled to Brussels on another matter. He returned to Dublin late on Friday evening and went into the Department on the following Monday, October 2nd. He was in Brussels on September 29th, 1995, when a letter was received from Mr Dermot Desmond's IIU Ltd, informing the Department that it was now involved in the Digifone consortium. The fact that a letter was received was conveyed to Mr Brennan but the content of the letter was not revealed to him.

At the time of the meeting in Copenhagen it was expected that a draft report on the competition would be available by October 3th, and that a final report would be available by October 17th, Mr Brennan said.

He could not see why the minister was not entitled to know the result once it was arrived at. He also said he could not see why there would be any block on the minister expressing a view on having the production of the report speeded up.He did not believe the result could have been changed by Mr Lowry or the government without a clear and substantial reason and without legal advice from the attorney general.