Moriarty team set to reveal how O'Brien firm won huge GSM licence

By Jim Morahan,

Observers suspect the outcome will have serious implications for the State in the way its business was conducted at that crucial time. The upcoming evidence will be closely watched by a number of parties, particularly the bidders who failed to secure the lucrative licence.

So far, the five-year-old tribunal has thrown the spotlight on the financial links between former Minister Michael Lowry and businessman Denis O'Brien - central figures in the GSM licence award.

When the tribunal resumes, its lawyers are expected to detail their discoveries in private investigations - which began last November - regarding Mr Lowry's awarding of the country's second mobile telephone licence to Mr O'Brien.

After that, lawyers make their major detailed statement charting how the next instalment of evidence will be presented, and the tribunal is expected to adjourn again until further public hearings until September.

Just a year ago, the legal team presented evidence to show how money belonging to O'Brien was transferred to Lowry - both before and after the Independent TD for Tipperary North left the Cabinet.

Last year tribunal lawyers made it quite clear they suspected O'Brien used his former accountant Aidan Phelan for the transfer of O'Brien's money to Lowry.

They put it to Phelan that O'Brien had been giving financial support to Lowry from the summer of 1996 to the end of 1999.

Tribunal counsel John Coughlan SC put it to Phelan that when this was discovered, false paperwork was put in place to support an untrue story.

Mr Coughlan claimed that, specifically, UK property deals put together for Lowry by Phelan in 1998 and l999 were the follow-up to the failed attempt by O'Brien to transfer money to Lowry via David Austin - the now deceased businessman and colleague of Michael Smurfit - in late 1996. Phelan strongly denied this interpretation.

Very soon after Esat Digifone signed its contract to operate the second mobile phone network, O'Brien made a controversial payment to Austin, who in turn gave it as a "loan" to Lowry. The tribunal alleged that what O'Brien described as a legitimate house purchase in Spain was, in fact, a failed attempt to put stg£150,000 Lowry's way. In evidence, O'Brien denied this.

The next crucial phase of the tribunal's work will focus on the background to the GSM award going to the O'Brien-driven Esat Digifone international consortium. When the business was sold to British Telecom a few years later for 1.52bn, O'Brien walked away with euro230m for himself.

This autumn, evidence is expected from EU officials on how the original licence came to be valued at 19m. Lowry told the Cabinet that price was due to European Commission pressure, but tribunal lawyers doubt this.