O’Callaghan faked document, claims Gilmartin

PROPERTY developer Tom Gilmartin has accused business rival Owen O’Callaghan of faking a document supplied to the Mahon Tribunal.

Mr Gilmartin told the tribunal that a document purporting to be a land purchase contract between himself and Mr O'Callaghan and bearing a signature in Mr Gilmartin's name was not the contract he signed. Mr Gilmartin could not account for the whereabouts of the correct version of the contract, but he insisted under cross-examination by senior counsel Paul Sreenan that the one before the tribunal was fake.

"That's a falsified agreement by your crook of a client," he said. The contract related to an agreement by Mr O'Callaghan in late 1988 to sell his interest in a site at Neilstown in Dublin to Mr Gilmartin. The Neilstown site had the valuable "town centre development" zoning which Mr Gilmartin needed for his own site at Quarryvale.

Mr Gilmartin believed that as long as Mr O'Callaghan held open the prospect of building a shopping centre on the Neilstown site, he would never get his own site rezoned as the two locations would be competing for business.

He insisted yesterday that the £3.5 million contract he signed provided for the last installment to be paid subject to rezoning being secured on the Quarryvale site, a condition missing from the document before the tribunal.

He also said Mr O'Callaghan broke their contract and went ahead and applied for planning permission for Neilstown even though he had no intention of developing it, just to "stymie" Mr Gilmartin's plans for Quarryvale.

Among other vigorously contested allegations Mr Gilmartin made against his Cork-based rival who eventually went on to take over the Quarryvale lands and build the Liffey Valley shopping centre was the claim that he paid lobbyist Frank Dunlop to bribe councillors to favour his developments over Mr Gilmartin's. He also repeated a claim that Mr O'Callaghan told him in 1988 that he had got the line of the Lee Tunnel in Cork changed to favour his development lands in the city.

Mr Sreenan put it repeatedly to Mr Gilmartin that he was looking for someone to blame for his own failures in relation to Quarryvale. He pointed out that Mr Gilmartin was pushing a development that had no zoning or planning permission and no confirmed external investors, and which was five times bigger than the Liffey Valley project the planners would eventually agree to.

He said letters between Mr O'Callaghan and Mr Gilmartin about a proposed role for Mr O'Callaghan as project manager for the Quarryvale proposal showed his client's superior expertise and experience in business. Mr Gilmartin rejected the suggestion. "If Mr O'Callaghan lived to be a thousand, there is nothing he would be able to teach me except of course skulduggery," he said.

Yesterday's proceedings were conducted with two gardaí present after a stern warning was delivered by Judge Alan Mahon to the public gallery to refrain from laughing, clapping or jeering. He said he would clear the chamber if there were gallery interruptions.