One of two brothers who alleged they had paid Mr James Gogarty £50,000 in 1989 has admitted his company made another payment of £50,000 at around the same time to cover business expenses.
Mr Michael Bailey said that on November 24th 1989, he and his brother Thomas had gone to Anglo Irish Bank and collected a cheque for £50,000. They cashed it, placed the money in a briefcase and gave it to Mr Gogarty in the Royal Dublin Hotel.
Mr Bailey said he did not accept Mr Gogarty's statement that he had not received the money from the brothers.
The alleged payment did not appear in the records available to the tribunal and Mr Bailey said he did not believe he had told his auditor about it.
Mr Desmond O'Neill SC, for the tribunal, drew Mr Bailey's attention to a document from the auditors of their company, Bovale Developments Ltd. This showed a sequence of expenditures for the year ending June 1991. This indicated that in the year ending 1990, a payment of £50,000 had been made in relation to lands under the heading "Grange".
Mr Bailey identified this as referring to lands at Mountgorry, near Swords, Co Dublin, which were owned by Grange Developments. Mr Bailey agreed that Bovale Developments had entered a contract to purchase these for £3.25 million with a £600,000 deposit on the land.
Mr Bailey said that although the purchase fell through, this deposit had not been recovered.
He said while he fully recalled the expenditure of the £600,000 for the deposit, he did not know of any other expenditure on the Grange lands. "But if the record shows the £50,000, then that's what it shows," he said. Mr Bailey said he believed this money had gone towards architects' and engineers' fees.
Mr O'Neill suggested that had planning permission for the land been granted and had the sale gone through, it would have been worth about £9 million.
Mr Bailey said this was not necessarily so. In the case of the Mountgorry lands, "it turned out that the land was valueless," he said.
In order to build on the lands, an application had been made to Dublin County Council for planning permission. A similar permission had earlier been sought by Grange Developments and been refused. The council had paid compensation of almost £1.8 million in respect of planning on these lands.
Seven days after an application for planning permission had been sought in September 1989, three councillors, including Mr Sean Walsh, the then chairman of Dublin County Council, moved a motion directing the county manager to act in support of the application.
As the proposed development was in contravention of the county development plan, this was necessary for the proposal to progress.
Mr Bailey said Mr Walsh had been "very upset" about the loss of money to the council and very keen that it be recouped. This would have happened had permission been granted.