Lowry ‘cleared of accelerating mobile licence award’

FORMER Communications Minister Michael Lowry has been exonerated from any involvement in speeding up the process of awarding the tender for the State’s second mobile phone licence, his senior counsel argued before the Moriarty Tribunal yesterday.

Documents, whose significance was only highlighted last week, show that civil servants and outside consultants involved in the evaluation of the tenders had laid down a time-table for the completion of the process.

This timetable was drawn up before Mr Lowry, after seeing the rankings of three of the bidders, is alleged to have told one civil servant he would like to see the process accelerated.

One of the three was the winning bidder, a consortium headed by Denis O’Brien’s Esat, and it has been suggested any acceleration favoured that group’s bid.

But Roderic O’Hanlon, SC for Mr Lowry, told the tribunal the letter and accompanying document “should exonerate the minister completely”.

On the basis of these documents, Mr O’Hanlon asked that the issue of whether the minister accelerated the process not be pressed further.

He further claimed that evidence given by witnesses in relation to this aspect of the tribunal’s investigation is tainted because there was a presumption contained within a number of questions that there had been some acceleration and that the minister might have been involved.

The documents could turn out to be crucial when tribunal chair Mr Justice Michael Moriarty is drawing up that portion of his report on Mr Lowry’s involvement in the process that led to the award of the second licence in October 1995.

Mr Justice Moriarty, in response to Mr O’Hanlon, said the issue of any possible acceleration in the process was one aspect of his inquiry; that it would be wrong to truncate this line of inquiry; but that the documents will be given all “fair and deliberative weight” ahead of the judge giving a final view.

The documents relate to correspondence dated September 14 between civil servant Martin Brennan and outside consultants Anderson Management International (AMI). The timetable envisaged a draft final document completed by October 3 with the final report on the minister’s desk by October 25, the day the winning bid was announced.

The tribunal has heard that some time between September 28 and October 3, the minister told Mr Brennan he would like to see the process accelerated.