Senior civil servant says Lowry had no influence on decision

The secretary-general of the Department of Transport, Energy and Communications at the time of the 1995 mobile phone licence competition, Mr John Loughrey, has said he takes full responsibility for the competition and its outcome.

He said he believed that Mr Lowry could not have influenced the licence competition process.

The project to introduce competition into the mobile phone market was seen as a milestone within the Department because of its importance to the economy, Mr Loughrey said.

He said Mr Lowry, as a successful businessman and entrepreneur, would have seen the necessity to introduce competition. "We are all creatures of our background," he said.

He was totally in favour of the idea that a protocol on contacts between those involved in the competition process and members of bidding consortiums be drafted.

He had "several times" raised the matter with Mr Lowry. He said it was necessary for the Department to be like Caesar's wife, above suspicion.

Mr Loughrey said it was his recollection that Mr Lowry knew he should not be seen to be doing anything which could create the wrong impression up to the time of the decision in relation to the competition.

He believed the minister was no longer held by this protocol once the licence decision was announced.

Mr Loughrey said Mr Lowry would have been within his rights in getting involved in the negotiations which took place after the competition and before the actual award of the licence to Esat Digifone. The licence involved a scarce resource being given over, and the State's interests needed to be guarded.

However, he was not aware of Mr Lowry showing the slightest interest in the licence negotiations until near the very end.

Asked about a copy of the first page of a letter from the European Commission to Mr Lowry, a copy of which came into the possession of a solicitor acting for Esat Telecom, Mr Jarlath Burke, Mr Loughrey said he would have had to consider the matter if it had come to his attention at the time. It had not.

When asked by Mr John Coughlan SC, for the tribunal, whether knowledge of what had happened would at the time have caused him to cancel the competition, Mr Loughrey said: "No. I don't think so."

He said he could think of nothing more damaging to the process than a bidder becoming aware of the secret weightings to be applied to the criteria which were to be used when assessing the bids.

However, he said, he did not believe the letter from the commission came into that category. He did not believe the letter "holed the competition below the waterline".

The question for him would have been whether the information conferred an advantage such that it rendered the competition null and void. He did not believe the information in the letter was such.

Mr Loughrey said he told Mr Lowry on October 25th, 1995, that Digifone had won the competition. The information had been given to him by Mr Martin Brennan, the civil servant who chaired the assessment team.

He recommended to Mr Lowry that he seek approval from the leaders of the three parties which formed the coalition government for immediately accepting the assessment team's decision.

It was his experience in the past that it was best not to allow time to elapse between a decision being made and announced. He said he had often discussed the subject with his colleagues in Whitehall. The classic case was the Westland helicopter case in the UK, where the government almost "imploded".

If there had been space and time he thought people might have tried to exercise the leverage they believed existed. People often thought they had leverage, even though in his experience they had not.

He said the decision not to follow normal procedures in relation to government decisions should be seen in the light that it involved the then Taoiseach, Mr John Bruton, who was the sole guardian of government procedures. If Mr Bruton thought taking the political rather than the procedural route was OK, then it was OK.

Mr Loughrey said that on October 25th, 1995, when the decision was announced, he was not aware that Mr Dermot Desmond or IIU Ltd was involved in the consortium.

He is to continue giving evidence when the tribunal resumes next Tuesday.