THE MORIARTY TRIBUNAL/Analysis: The team to select who should get the most lucrative government concession yet did not follow its own working model and was subjected to intervention by Michael Lowry, according to the Moriarty tribunal. Colm Keena reports
Yesterday the tribunal set out an overview of the information it had gathered to date in its ongoing inquiry into the 1995 competition for the State's second mobile phone licence and outlined a number of areas to which it suggested it would now direct its focus.
Mr Jerry Healy SC, for the tribunal, said it was forming a clearer picture of the competition process and especially of that period in which the Danish consultant, Mr Michael Andersen, was most intimately involved.
Mr Andersen's Danish firm, Andersen Management International (AMI), won the tender for the role of consultant to the team which selected the competition winner. The team was made up of civil servants and was to be free of political interference.
Mr Healy said the team adopted a model presented by AMI which was to be used to evaluate the bids and decide on the winner. Certain aspects of the six bids were to be compared quantitatively. This meant that certain criteria which could be measured and given marks were to be compared and the bids ranked according to their scores.
A second evaluation was then to be carried out, involving a qualitative evaluation of the bids. Aspects of the bids which could not be easily measured quantitatively would be graded using letters, A being best and E being worst. The results of the quantitative and qualitative evaluations would then be compared.
These were to be the three steps in the process.
What actually happened, once the bids were received and the evaluations began, however, is that the quantitative part of the evaluation model was ditched. Furthermore, the decision to ditch that part of the process does not feature with any prominence in the minutes of the team's various meetings held during the evaluation period.
Some quantitative evaluation did take place and ranked the Esat Digifone bid third. Persona, the consortium which is threatening to sue the State, was ranked first by the quantitative evaluations.
Without the quantitative evaluation part of the model, the team went on to select a winner on the basis solely of the qualitative evaluations.
Furthermore, the As, Bs, Cs and so on which the various bids scored as part of this exercise were converted into scores or numbers as the process came to near-completion. This was because when grades or letters were used, it was hard to work out who the winner was. When the letters were converted to numbers, Esat Digifone emerged as the winner.
Mr Healy said there were suggestions that this changing of grades to scores may have been inappropriate and that it may even have distorted the result.
Mr Andersen, who is based in Copenhagen, was obviously a key player in these developments. He has attended Dublin Castle for private interviews with the tribunal and has submitted a narrative statement concerning the operation of the evaluation. (In the document he said the Esat Digifone submission was one of the best he ever saw in any jurisdiction.)
Last year Mr Andersen's company was purchased by an entity which has links with the Norwegian company, Telenor, which in 1995 formed part of the Digifone consortium. Mr Andersen and the new owners of AMI have been unable to agree to terms under which he would appear to give evidence. Mr Healy said yesterday that it seemed Mr Andersen would not now be attending to give evidence.
Mr Healy also said that all he had outlined to do with evaluation models had to be viewed in circumstances where it appeared the minister, Mr Michael Lowry, had intervened in what was to have been a sealed process.
The tribunal has already heard evidence that the minister was told in early October 1995, after the grades had been changed to scores, that Esat Digifone was the top-ranked bid. It has also heard that Mr Lowry urged that the process be accelerated.
Until a few days prior to the announcement by Mr Lowry on October 25th, 1995, that Esat Digifone had won, some members of the team thought a good deal more work remained to be done in relation to the evaluation process.