Lawlor faces fourth prison term and prosecution
It emerged yesterday the tribunal may refer Mr Lawlor to the DPP for his contradictory evidence on oath in his 10 days in the witness box at Dublin Castle last month.
The tribunal also postponed a decision on whether to refer Mr Lawlor’s continuing failure to co-operate with the inquiry to the High Court until next month.
Mr Lawlor originally claimed that stg£100,000 he received three years ago was a finder’s fee linked to the advice he gave Irish property developer Michael Whelan about a building in London.
However, he later accepted that it was an under-the-counter payment related to the sale of one acre of his own land at Lucan for £825,000 in 2000.
The former Dublin West TD was also threatened with an unprecedented fourth term in prison over his non-compliance with an order issued by the tribunal last March. He has served a total of six weeks in Mountjoy Prison for contempt since 2000.
The discovery order required Mr Lawlor to hand over all documentation relating to his extensive business dealings in Ireland and abroad, especially the sale of his land at Lucan. Tribunal chairman Judge Alan
Mahon ruled the inquiry’s legal team would need more time to ssess 11,000 pages of documentation which Mr Lawlor delivered to the tribunal’s offices last Tuesday.
Tribunal barrister Des O’Neill said just over 300 pages appeared to have any relevance to Mr Lawlor’s land sale in Lucan.
They also showed he withdrew over 316,000 of the proceeds of this transaction from a bank account in Gibraltar last year. However, Mr O’Neill said the documentation failed to explain how almost 243,000, or three-quarters of the money, was ultimately spent.
In reply, Mr Lawlor explained he didn’t have enough time to adequately classify the documentation as he had only obtained records from solicitors in London, Prague and the Channel Islands in the past week.
He claimed most of his expenditure was related to normal expenses and outgoings, including repayments on a car lease and air tickets. “Everything is traceable down to the last penny” he added.
Judge Mahon said the tribunal wanted to examine Mr Lawlor’s expenditure after the former TD had complained that he was unable to get documentation because he couldn’t afford a £10,000 legal bill from a firm of London solicitors.
The tribunal chairman said Mr Lawlor’s breakdown of his own spending turned out “to be inaccurate to a very big degree”. Mr Lawlor was also ordered to file several more affidavits on a number of related matters by next month. The tribunal adjourned for the summer holidays until September 16.
