THE MORIARTY tribunal does not have a “working hypothesis” that Persona should have won the 1995 mobile phone licence competition, the lead Danish consultant to the competition was told yesterday.
Michael McDowell SC, for the tribunal, told Prof Michael Andersen these were his instructions. The competition was won by Denis O’Brien’s Esat Digifone.
Mr McDowell said the tribunal did have a working hypothesis that there was “a very sudden” change in some of the weightings used when the bids received for the licence were being evaluated.
Prof Andersen said he did not know when the change between weightings agreed in June, and used in October, had occurred.
However, he said the weightings used in the evaluation reports drafted in October were correct as they were approved by the team of civil servants and the consultants involved in the process.
Mr McDowell said the tribunal had heard evidence that civil servants Martin Brennan and Fintan Towey had gone to Copenhagen on September 28th, 1995, and that they believed it was at a meeting there with Prof Andersen that the change in weightings had been agreed.
Prof Andersen said he had no recollection of any such meeting and his diary showed he had been in Sweden that day.
He had a memory of a telephone conference but he was not ruling out the possibility that a meeting may have occurred.
Prof Andersen said the weightings used in the final report had been reviewed and agreed by everyone involved.
The evaluation process was a hugely complex one. He said he did not understand why Mr McDowell was suggesting there might be something not correct about it.
He said that during private meetings some years ago with the tribunal he had explained they were wrong to believe aspects of the quantitative analysis showed Persona as the winner. “That understanding was never taken on board by the tribunal.”
When reference was made to one aspect of the assessment process “withering away” this meant that the quantitative assessment of the bids, which involved scoring aspects of the various submissions for the licence, would not lead to a stand-alone quantitative report that would be appended to the final overall report.
The final report was to have included a quantitative and qualitative analysis and a final holistic ranking.
Because difficulties emerged that would prevent the production of a stand-alone quantitative report, greater emphasis had to be put on the qualitative aspect of the exercise, he said. However, work continued on scoring the bids and this work fed into the qualitative assessments.
“It is critical to understand this if we are to understand the evaluation process correctly,” he said.
Prof Andersen continues his evidence on Monday.