Mr Paul Clinton, the project manager for the Millennium Mall planned for O'Connell Street in Dublin, said yesterday he had notified the European Commission that the National Conference Centre proposed for Spencer Dock was now in breach of EU rules.
Because of delays in progressing the project, a promised EU grant of £26 million was now gone. But the Government's proposal to replace it with a straight Exchequer grant ran counter to the EU's rules against providing State aids to a commercial enterprise.
An Bord Pleanala's presiding inspector, Mr Des Johnson, suggested to Mr Clinton that the tenor of his oral evidence ran counter to the generally supportive appeal which he had lodged on behalf of the Carlton Group, in that he seemed to be "trying to scupper it".
Mr Clinton said Bord Failte's brief for the conference centre had specified a building costing between £35 million and £45 million, but the one now proposed by a development consortium led by Treasury Holdings was twice as large and estimated to cost £104 million.
He said it was ironic that Keelgrove Ltd, then a Treasury subsidiary, had appealed against the Carlton Group's scheme on the grounds that it did not have sufficient legal interest in the site and that the volume of car parking proposed, some 700 spaces, was "excessive".
Mr Clinton said the Spencer Dock developers were proposing nearly 7,000 parking spaces on the CIE-owned site and they did not own Campion's pub, a listed building on the site, which his group was offered for its "strategic nuisance value" but decided against buying. This was a reference to a phrase used in the minutes of a meeting between Treasury Holdings and the Carlton Group in September 1997, when the phrase was used in relation to a triangular site on Moore Lane owned by Keelgrove, abutting the Carlton Group's property.
Mr Johnson informed the inquiry that he had received a written submission on the Spencer Dock project from Bord Failte, the commissioning agency for the conference centre, last Friday. However, he had "refused to accept it", sending it back to the tourist board for clarification.