The examination of multi-millionaire Mr Denis O'Brien by tribunal counsel Mr John Coughlan yesterday was one of the most tetchy or bad tempered seen to date.
At one stage Mr O'Brien said he was refusing to answer a question from Mr Coughlan, though he later went on to give an answer.
Mr O'Brien said he was contacted by telephone in early November 1995 by the late Mr David Austin and asked to make a contribution to Fine Gael. He decided not to as Mr Michael Lowry had just a week earlier announced that Esat Digifone was the winner of the State's second mobile phone licence. A payment under the circumstances might be "inappropriate".
Mr O'Brien said the request for a donation was to him as chairman and chief executive of Esat Telecom, the company which then owned 37.5 per cent of Esat Digifone. When Mr Coughlan asked would it not also, therefore, have been inappropriate for Esat Digifone - the licence winner - to make a donation, Mr O'Brien, after an initial refusal to answer the question, agreed it would.
Mr O'Brien's evidence is that during his conversation with Mr Austin he suggested that the Norwegian firm Telenor, Esat Telecom's then partner in the Esat Digifone project, might want to make a donation.
Mr O'Brien subsequently spoke with Telenor executive Mr Arve Johansen, about the possibility of a donation and passed on Mr Austin's telephone number. Mr O'Brien has not yet been asked why, if he thought it inappropriate for Esat Telecom or Esat Digifone to make a donation, he should then suggest that Telenor make a payment. Mr Johansen has said Mr O'Brien asked him to make a donation on Esat Digifone's behalf, and said that Telenor would later be reimbursed. Mr O'Brien is adamant that this is not the case.
The money - $50,000 - was paid by Telenor to the late Mr Austin. Mr Austin sent an invoice to Telenor purporting to show that consultancy services worth $50,000 had been provided.
In a covering letter he wrote that the invoice was for consultancy work "as agreed with Mr Denis O'Brien". Mr O'Brien says this is an exaggeration of his involvement.
A note put on the covering letter by a Telenor executive, Mr Neut Digerund, noted the amount was to be later reembursed from Digifone. Mr Digerund later became the chief executive officer of Esat Digifone.
The payment was subsequently refunded by Esat Digifone, though only after a succession of invoices were supplied by the Norwegian firm, earlier ones being unsatisfactory to Dublin because of their mentioning Mr Austin and US dollars.
Mr O'Brien said the refund came about when, during intense negotiations between the two shareholders in the run-up to the award of the licence in May 1996, Telenor insisted Esat Digifone accept liability for the payment.
Mr O'Brien said Telenor "made" Esat Digifone accept liability, prompting Mr Coughlan to remind him he was talking about serious businessmen and not schoolchildren. Mr O'Brien said the acceptance came about in the context of trying to deal with 10 to 15 outstanding matters in discussions concerning a £160 million project. The liability was accepted despite his earlier belief that it would be inappropriate for Esat Digifone to make a donation.
Mr O'Brien didn't think any minutes of these intense negotiations existed. He could not recall who was involved on the Telenor side.
Mr Johansen gave evidence in the morning. In one of the lighter moments of the day he said he knew little about Ireland before entering into the Esat Digifone project. He noticed that firms and individuals seemed to have bank accounts both in Ireland and offshore. When he saw that Mr Austin wanted the contribution paid into an offshore account, he said, well, here's another one.