Fitzwilton will launch a legal bid in the High Court tomorrow to block the Mahon Tribunal from holding any public hearings into a £30,000 payment by the company to Ray Burke for Fianna Fail Funds.
Mr John Gordon, SC, counsel for Fitzwilton, told Mr Justice Barry White today that the application would "go to the heart of the Tribunal's entitlement to have public hearings at all" relating to the Fitzwilton payment.
He said that should he succeed in obtaining leave of the court to challenge the Tribunal's right to hold public hearings he would be asking the court to impose a stay on the hearings which the Tribunal had scheduled to start on September 28th.
Mr Gordon, who appeared with Mr Maurice Collins, SC, and Mr Bernard Dunleavy, said the question of the Tribunal holding public hearings into the £30,000 payment had been under investigation by the Tribunal since April 1998.
In that seven-year period the Tribunal had engaged with Fitzwilton and investigated the matter between 1998 and the Spring of 2000.
The Tribunal had then dropped the matter for some years. In February 2003 the Tribunal had decided to look at it again and between February and September of that year his clients had again engaged with the Tribunal and had given them every assistance they possibly could.
"At the end of that particular period we had left the Tribunal with a submission which made it clear there was no basis for any public hearings in relations to this matter," Mr Gordon said.
He said they had heard nothing more between September 2003 and 4th July, 2005 from the Tribunal and the company had been left in the position of thinking the matter was at an end until it had popped up in July last.
Mr Gordon said the reason for the Tribunal's decision to "pop in" a module in relation to Fitzwilton now was that it had run into problems with Quarryvale Two hearings over which there had been litigation concerning documents.
Fitzwilton had been given leave of the High Court earlier this month to seek access to documentation from the Tribunal relating to its decision to hold public hearings. Mr Gordon said the new application challenging the right of the Tribunal to hold public hearings should take precedence.