Counsel for the Norwegian company Telenor launched an aggressive attack on the credibility of Mr Denis O'Brien yesterday. The legal teams, reporters and members of the public present seemed to cower as direct questions mixed with caustic remarks were hurled towards the witness box.
At the outset Mr Eoghan Fitzsimons SC said he didn't want his questioning interrupted by Mr Eoin McGonigal SC, for Mr O'Brien. Soon after his launch into Mr O'Brien, Mr McGonigal rose to his feet and turned to his fellow barrister to ask him to formulate his questions in a more polite manner. The request was ignored.
Mr O'Brien's attempts to take control, to raise his own questions or suggest that they stop to look at documents, were all ignored by Mr Fitzsimons. When Mr O'Brien's answers were not direct Mr Fitzsimons would say the chairman would draw his own conclusions from Mr O'Brien's evasiveness.
For all of that Mr O'Brien, after he had recovered from the initial shock, began to give as good as he got.
What was at issue was something very serious, Mr Fitz simons said. Either his client, Telenor, was telling the truth, or Mr O'Brien was. It had to be one or the other, and the chairman, Mr Justice Moriarty, would have to decide on the issue "in black and white".
Mr Fitzsimons concentrated on the $50,000 payment by Telenor to the late Mr David Austin, intended for Fine Gael. The payment came following an approach by Mr Austin to Mr O'Brien. Mr O'Brien decided it would not be appropriate for his company, Esat Telecom, to make a donation given that Esat Digifone had just been awarded a mobile phone licence by Mr Michael Lowry. Telecom owned 40 per cent of Digifone and Telenor another 40 per cent.
Mr O'Brien suggested to Telenor that it might want to make a donation, Mr O'Brien has said. Mr Fitzsimons asked why, if it was inappropriate for Esat Telecom to make a payment, it was appropriate for Telenor to do so.
He said Telenor, which was operating in Ireland for only a few months prior to the payment, had trusted Mr O'Brien and had depended on him.
Mr O'Brien said he informed Mr Arve Johansen, of Telenor, that he wasn't making a donation because of the proximity to the licence announcement. It was then up to Telenor to decide if it wanted to make a donation, he said.
The Telenor donation was rejected by Mr John Bruton and kept by Mr Austin for more than a year before he passed it on, with interest, as a personal donation to the party. Mr Fitzsimons said he would only have done this with Mr O'Brien's consent, but Mr O'Brien said Mr Austin had never told him that he had held on to the money or that there was any difficulty. He said he and Mr Austin were close but they "never talked politics".