Evidence heard by the tribunal last year is to be reviewed in the light of letters uncovered by The Irish Times. Colm Keena reports
Last March some letters which seemed to indicate the Moriarty Tribunal was being misled were given to this reporter.
Two copies of two separate letters were involved. The difference between the two letters was important but what seemed more important was the fact that different versions of the same letters existed at all. The net point being: was someone involved in doctoring letters to support evidence which was being given to the tribunal?
The letters were, in journalistic terms, explosive.
They concerned a property in Cheadle, England, which is at the centre of one of a number of complicated transactions all of which link Mr Michael Lowry with Mr Denis O'Brien. In no instance is the link between the two men a direct one and various complicated scenarios have been outlined to the tribunal concerning each transaction. The problem is that no independent contemporaneous document which proves any of these scenarios has yet been presented to the tribunal. Hence the ongoing inquiries.
I was given copies of two file letters which I believed had been given to the tribunal by Mr Christopher Vaughan, the English solicitor who acted in relation to the Cheadle transaction. These, I believed, were copies of letters which the tribunal was told had been sent to Mr Kevin Phelan, a Northern Ireland businessman.
I was also given top copies of the letters, ie the copies which had been written on headed notepaper and actually sent out. They differed from the file copies. In one instance, two references to "Michael" had been removed. In the other, a reference to "our client" had been replaced with the words "Aidan Phelan".
The implications were obvious. The problem faced by The Irish Times was the nature of our libel laws. If the newspaper published the two letters with the obvious implication that someone may have been misleading the tribunal, it would have been open to a number of people to sue for libel.
A solution to this was to find out if the tribunal had the file copies of the letters and had never seen the top copies. If that was the case, then a report stating that the tribunal was investigating the matter might be protected from a libel suit by the argument that it was true.
The tribunal would not play ball. Copies of the letters were shown by me to Mr John Davis, the tribunal solicitor and he was asked if he'd seen them before. He wouldn't say. That meant that legally we had no story. Perhaps because we'd failed to produce a story, our source dried up.
Yesterday it emerged that the first thing Mr Davis did on March 21st when he got the letters was fax the file copy and top copy to Mr Vaughan and telephone him to ask him to explain. Mr Vaughan said the letters did appear to be his. He suggested the file copies might have been early drafts.
Letters from Mr Kevin Phelan's files had been supplied to the tribunal prior to March. They contained "top copies" of the two letters sent out by Mr Vaughan, but they were top copies which contained no reference to Mr Lowry and did have a reference to Mr Aidan Phelan. In other words, the top copies from Mr Kevin Phelan's files were the same as the file copies Mr Vaughan had. The top copies I'd given the tribunal were different.
Mr Davis wrote to Mr Vaughan a few days later, pointing out that, because of this, the file copies were not early drafts of the top copies, as he'd said earlier. A number of inferences could be drawn from this, Mr Davis said. "Two files appear to have been kept in connection with this matter, one for disclosure (to the tribunal) and one to be obscured from disclosure."
"This concealment may be related to the involvement of Mr Michael Lowry."
The tribunal has already been told in evidence that in February 2000 Mr Aidan Phelan took over ownership of the Cheadle property because Mr Lowry had not been able to get a guarantor for the Investec loan. However the two letters I'd been given were dated July and September 2000, and indicated the solicitor at the heart of the deal was still treating Mr Lowry as the owner of the property. Again, however, what was important was the fact of the disception, if deception it was, rather than the detail of the deception, if deception it was.
Mr Vaughan has since told the tribunal, in correspondence, that he was dealing with Mr Kevin Phelan in relation to a number of matters at the same time, with Mr Phelan acting as agent for a number of different parties at the same time. The top copies and file copies given to the tribunal may have been mistakes, with later letters then sent out correcting these. It was these later versions which the tribunal received in March, via The Irish Times.
Mr Vaughan, who is not denying that the letters given to the tribunal in March were written by him, is refusing to come to Dublin to give evidence. Mr Kevin Phelan has, in short, told the tribunal he is too busy and that he fears giving evidence might work against him in proceedings he is taking in England. Mr Lowry and Mr Denis O'Brien have said they know nothing about the letters. Mr Aidan Phelan is no longer resident here and did not comply with a request to give evidence yesterday. He may give evidence in the autumn. Mr Jerry Healy SC, for the tribunal, said yesterday that the tribunal had been involved in examining the various transactions involving Mr Lowry and Mr O'Brien. In the light of the letters received from The Irish Times, and the responses of various individuals "all of this evidence will clearly now have to be reviewed and some of it revisited".
All of this is taking place against the background of the awarding to Esat Digifone of the State's second mobile phone licence in 1995/1996. The competition for the licence was overseen by Mr Lowry, then a senior government minister. It was the largest commercial decision ever taken by a minister and a number of unsuccessful consortiums which bid for the licence were very aggrieved afterwards. The competition for the licence is now set to be the subject of an extended series of public sittings in the autumn. If anything untoward is revealed, the unsuccessful bidders may make multi- million euro case against the State.