MORIARTY TRIBUNAL:A RETIRED civil servant has told the Moriarty tribunal that the tribunal itself was the only context in which he had ever been accused of concealing matters from his minister.
Martin Brennan, who headed the project team that selected Esat Digifone as the winner of the 1995 mobile phone licence competition, said the idea was “far from my concept of the public sector”.
Mr Brennan was responding to John O’Donnell SC, for the Department of Transport, Energy and Communications, about information provided to Alan Dukes in December 1996, after he replaced Michael Lowry as minister in the department. He said Mr Dukes was “fully briefed” on the matter.
He was asked if he had at any stage concealed from Mr Dukes the way that Dermot Desmond’s IIU Nominees had become a shareholder in Esat in the period between entering the licence competition and being awarded the licence.
“I don’t believe that I consciously did so,” Mr Brennan said. “We had nothing to hide.” Mr Brennan said he had never been accused of misrepresenting matters to his minister before. It was “only in this context [the tribunal]” that it had ever been suggested, he said.
Mr Brennan told solicitor Michael Kelly, for Mr Lowry, that he had not been “in thrall” to Mr Lowry. He told Jim O’Callaghan SC, for Denis O’Brien, the founder of Esat, that he was not overborne in any way in his work as a civil servant. He was not “a slave to Mr Lowry’s wishes”. He had been a civil servant for 40 years and had not been in thrall “to Michael Lowry or any other minister”.
Jerry Healy SC, for the tribunal, said there was nothing in written advice received from Richard Nesbitt SC in May 1996 that addressed the issue that IIU was to take up a 25 per cent stake in Esat, even though this issue had been raised with Mr Nesbitt.
“We had already decided that that wasn’t going to fly,” Mr Brennan said. The bid for the licence had envisaged institutional shareholders having a 20 per cent stake and he didn’t believe IIU, in replacing them, could have greater.
Mr Healy said it worked both ways. Was there no mention in the legal advice of the legality of IIU replacing the institutions, because that issue had also already been decided? Mr Brennan did not agree.
The tribunal resumes on Tuesday.