Fitzwilton Ltd will launch a legal attempt in the High Court today to block the Mahon tribunal from holding any public hearings into a £30,000 payment by the company to Ray Burke for Fianna Fáil funds.
Senior counsel John Gordon, for Fitzwilton Ltd, told Mr Justice Barry White yesterday that today's application would "go to the heart of the tribunal's entitlement to have public hearings at all" relating to the Fitzwilton payment.
He said if he succeeded in obtaining leave from the High Court to challenge the tribunal's right to hold public hearings, he would ask the court to impose a stay on the hearings which the tribunal had scheduled to start on September 28th.
Mr Gordon, who appeared with Maurice Collins SC and 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 Ltd and had investigated the matter between 1998 and the spring of 2000. The tribunal had then dropped the matter.
In February 2003, the tribunal had decided to look at it again. Between February and September of that year, his clients had again engaged with the tribunal and had given it every assistance possible.
"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.
They had heard nothing more between September 2003 and July 4th, 2005, from the tribunal and the company had been left in the position of thinking the matter was at an end until it had come up last July.
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 2 hearings over which there had been litigation concerning documents.
Fitzwilton Ltd was given leave by the High Court earlier this month to seek access to documents 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.