MORIARTY TRIBUNAL:THE ECONOMIST Dr Peter Bacon told the Moriarty tribunal he thought a key part of the 1995 mobile phone licence competition was "strange" and "odd".
On his second and final day giving evidence to the tribunal, Dr Bacon said he believed the evaluation team that selected the winner was “wrong” to abandon an element of the methodology it was using to select the winner.
Responding to Richard Nesbitt SC, for the Department of Communications, Dr Bacon said he was happy with the evaluation model designed by Danish consultant Michael Andersen and which was to be used to assess the bids for the licence.
When Mr Nesbitt put it to Dr Bacon that none of the civil servants involved felt they had been influenced in any “Machiavellian” way, Dr Bacon said the only observation he would make was that he failed to understand why they did not follow their initial methodology
It struck him as “odd” and “strange” that just because the team felt it had not received all the data it required from the bidders, it abandoned the quantitative aspect of the evaluation.
“They threw out the baby with the bathwater,” he said. The team could have decided to work with the data they had received, or to seek more information from the bidders, he said. He said there was always a difficulty with the data submitted for such competitions. That was why there was a quantitative and a qualitative element to the process.
Even taking “the most benign view” of what the team had done, “they never examined the implications of withdrawing from the quantitative” evaluation, he said.
He said the decision led to difficulties when the team applied weightings to the results of the qualitative evaluation.
