TIPPERARY TD Michael Lowry has said a new company he established with three colleagues may never trade.
Mr Lowry is a 25 per cent shareholder in GDLC Business Consultants Ltd, which has an address in Dublin. The company was incorporated in August.
“It’s a company I’m registered with. It has not commenced operations and I don’t know if it will,” he said. He did not want to say for what purpose the company had been established.
“It was a project we were thinking of doing and now it’s not going to happen. Not from my perspective. It was a business consultancy thing.”
The other shareholders in the company are: Peter Cassidy, Vevay Road, Bray; Dermot Gaskin, Malahide, Co Dublin; and Seán Devine, Strabane, Co Fermanagh.
The company was set up to “carry on the provision of business consultancy, public relations, recruitment advisory and commodity broker services”, according to the opening paragraph of its articles of association.
Later articles refer to the carrying on of any business, including the purchase of property and the construction of related infrastructure.
Mr Devine was formerly a business partner of Omagh businessman Kevin Phelan, who has featured in the proceedings of the Moriarty tribunal. They were directors of a Bolton company called Omega Property Development Ltd. The third director of the company was a John Eastham.
The company, which was owned by Mr Devine and a company called Lonnar in the Isle of Man, was incorporated in 2003 and dissolved in August 2008.
Mr Phelan acted as a land scout in England in the 1990s and was involved with three land transactions that have been extensively investigated by the tribunal. It has been told that two, in Cheadle and Mansfield, involved Mr Lowry but not businessman Denis O’Brien, while a third, involving a football stadium in Doncaster, involved Mr O’Brien but not Mr Lowry. Mr Phelan has not given evidence to the tribunal.
Mr Lowry, a former Fine Gael member of government, is now an Independent TD.
