O'BRIEN REACTION:BUSINESSMAN Denis O'Brien says he will decide over the coming days whether he will take any legal action arising out of yesterday's report.
Mr O’Brien said he stood over his evidence to the tribunal “100 per cent” and that he had not paid “one red cent” to Michael Lowry.
He said not one of the witnesses who gave evidence had said he gave money to Mr Lowry or that his Esat Digifone consortium had won the 1995 mobile phone licence competition unfairly.
The tribunal said money that went from a Dublin account of Mr O’Brien’s in 1995 to an account opened in the Isle of Man, and from there to an account opened in Jersey by the late David Austin, and from there to an account opened by Mr Lowry in the Isle of Man, was a payment to Mr O’Brien to Mr Lowry.
Mr O’Brien said this was not so. He said he paid £150,000 to Mr Austin for a house in Spain that he bought for his parents. He had not been aware that Mr Austin had loaned the same money to Mr Lowry. Asked was it just a coincidence, Mr O’Brien said Mr Lowry had borrowed money from Mr Austin but he had not known about it. “If you like you can call it a coincidence . . . but I didn’t know about David Austin’s dealings with Mr Lowry.”
He disputed another finding that he supported a loan of £420,000stg for Mr Lowry in December 1999 from Investec Bank. “No way could you ring up a bank in Dublin in the 1990s and say give that loan to my friend. There is no way.”
Mr O’Brien was in Ashford Castle, Co Mayo, on Monday night for a party to celebrate 10 years of his successful Caribbean company Digicel. A couple of hundred senior managers from around the world had assembled for the event, he said. Then yesterday morning he learned that the tribunal report had been published and he came to Dublin.
He said he never for one minute thought in 1995 that Mr Lowry favoured his application for the mobile phone licence. His relationship with the Department of Communications at the time was “fraught”, he said.
He was “deeply upset” by the finding in the report that the competition was speeded up so as to favour his application. There was a chart from the period that set out a schedule for the process, which ended as per the schedule, he said.
He said the Danish consultant who had overseen the 1995 licence competition, Michael Andersen, had been a credible witness but his evidence had been “discarded”.
Prof Andersen told the tribunal the Esat bid was one of the best he had ever seen and that he believed the tribunal, in its inquiries into the matter, had shown a bias against Esat.
Mr O’Brien said everyone had said at the time that the Esat application was the best they had ever seen. He said it was not realistic to say, as the tribunal has found, that he would seek out a government minister in Croke Park or in a Dublin pub, to talk about the licence competition.
“They have started with threads and they have built a tapestry,” he said. “I will fight Michael Moriarty every step of the way.”
Asked if he had been surprised by the tribunal’s findings, Mr O’Brien said he had felt from the outset that the tribunal had a view against him. He said he had given the tribunal access to all his bank accounts around the world and had not sought to obstruct it. He contested the tribunal’s finding that people had sought to doctor documents so as to protect him and Mr Lowry.
