THE CHAIRMAN of the Moriarty tribunal has expressed concern about the evidence being given by an English solicitor to the inquiry about business dealings involving former government minister Michael Lowry.
Mr Justice Michael Moriarty said yesterday that Christopher Vaughan had not yet completed his evidence but “at this stage” it seemed some of his set responses “do not appear to carry all the balance and objectivity” that would be expected of a senior practitioner.
At the outset of the hearing, tribunal counsel Jerry Healy SC said the tribunal had been given documentation on Monday afternoon that indicated Mr Lowry had a more “emphatic” involvement in property deals in England than had been indicated in earlier evidence to the tribunal.
The documents included letters from Mr Vaughan to a Northern Ireland land agent, Kevin Phelan, written in 1999 and 2000 when Mr Vaughan was acting for the purchaser of properties in Mansfield and Cheadle.
Mr Vaughan said he hadn’t included the letters in the documents he gave the tribunal in 2001, as he had discarded the file in which they were contained. The letters mostly concern a proposed sale of the properties which had not gone ahead. Mr Phelan sent the letters to Mr Vaughan some weeks ago, the tribunal heard, and Mr Vaughan forwarded them to the tribunal on Monday.
One of the letters, dated August 2000, indicated that Mr Lowry would make a £600,000 profit from the sale of the property at Cheadle.
Mr Lowry has told the tribunal that the Cheadle property was not his as he had failed to come up with the funds to close the deal. The deal had been closed by Aidan Phelan, an accountant who at the time had been working for businessman Denis O’Brien.
As well as the letters it had not seen before, the tribunal has also been given a new version of a letter it was given before. The new version mentions Mr Lowry whereas the earlier version given to the tribunal does not mention him.
Mr Vaughan rejected the suggestion by Mr Healy that he was “trifling” with the tribunal.
The tribunal is investigating whether Mr Lowry received financial support from Mr O’Brien in relation to the English deals. Both Mr Lowry and Mr O’Brien have denied that this was the case.
In a letter dated January 2001, Mr Vaughan wrote that a firm called Chesterton had found that the envisaged development of the Cheadle site would not be allowed. “It seems to me, therefore, that ML is going to struggle to make any sort of profit on this site, or indeed even get his money back,” Mr Vaughan wrote to Kevin Phelan.
When making his comments regarding Mr Vaughan's evidence, Mr Justice Moriarty quoted the poem, The Donkey,by GK Chesterton: "When fishes flew and forests walked and figs grew upon thorn."