The creation of a forged invoice to cover a £100,000 sterling under-the-counter payment to Mr Liam Lawlor was dismissed by him yesterday as no "big hill of beans".
The former Dublin West TD was unable to explain how the document came to be produced, although he said he believed it belonged to one of his solicitors, Mr Tony Seddon.
The chairman, Mr Alan Mahon, said this could not be the case as Mr Seddon had testified that the invoice was not of a type used in his office. The only possibility was that the invoice was manufactured using "bits and pieces" of headed notepaper.
"I can't agree with that," Mr Lawlor replied. "It's a Seddon document. I did not produce it."
Asked why he had not challenged Mr Seddon's evidence when the solicitor testified to the tribunal last Thursday, Mr Lawlor replied that his only concern at the time was to "bury" a "headline-grabbing" claim by counsel for the tribunal, Mr Des O'Neill, that he was "sheltering" the £100,000 payment in the Czech Republic.
Mr O'Neill yesterday put it to Mr Lawlor that unless he was in the business of forging documents on a daily basis this must have been a serious matter for him.
But Mr Lawlor replied: "It was not any big hill of beans, as far as I am concerned."
Mr O'Neill put it to the witness that, by refusing to acknowledge it was a forged document, he was continuing to perpetrate what he knew to be untrue.
Mr Lawlor replied that he accepted the document was not prepared by the accounts department of Seddon's London office but beyond that, he said, "I just don't have a clue."
