Former Fianna Fáil TD Mr Liam Lawlor has admitted to the Mahon tribunal that he used headed notepaper from a solicitor's office in Prague to create a false invoice.
The invoice was used to hide a secret payment made to Mr Lawlor for an acre of land in Lucan that he sold to a London-based property company.
Mr Lawlor told the tribunal he generated the invoice for £100,000 on headed notepaper from Seddons Solicitors that he took from the company's office in Prague.
He told the tribunal he had had "the full run" of the Seddons office in Prague for over 12 years and had frequently used the secretarial facilities there.
Mr Lawlor told the tribunal he had been in contact with Mr Tony Seddon, a partner in the solicitors firm, last week in connection with retrieving documents requested by the tribunal.
When asked by counsel for the tribunal Mr Des O'Neill if Mr Seddon expressed any surprise that his company notepaper had been used as a "device to fabricate an invoice", Mr Lawlor said he was "dissatisfied at what had happened".
Mr Lawlor said Mr Seddon told him there would be "no record of this invoice".
In his evidence Mr Lawlor said he most likely asked one of the company's secretaries to type up the invoice on one of his many visits to Prague some time after September 2000 when the deal had been finalised.
However, he said that he could not recall the exact details.
When Mr O'Neill put it to Mr Lawlor that the transaction was an "entirely unlikely scenario", the former councillor said the whole method of payment was an unlikely scenario but that he had been "guided in this direction" by the London-based property developers Mr Michael Whelan and Mr John Barrett who had purchased the land.
Last week the tribunal established Mr Lawlor had received the £100,000 as a secret cash payment relating to the sale of an acre of land beside his home in Somerton, Lucan, to a company owned by Mr Whelan and Mr Barrett.
He had previously told the tribunal he was paid the money for his part in discovering an office building in Piccadilly for the two developers.
