THE CHAIRMAN of the Moriarty tribunal said yesterday that he had not yet decided if it had heard its last witness.
Mr Justice Michael Moriarty was speaking at the conclusion of the evidence of Massimo Prelz, a venture capitalist who was involved with Denis O’Brien’s Esat Digifone in 1995, and who was called at the request of Mr O’Brien after the tribunal’s provisional findings were issued last year.
The chairman said the tribunal was continuing with its investigations and would do so up to the publication of its final report. He said that only yesterday it had received a new and potentially sensitive document which would have to be assessed.
During yesterday’s hearings it emerged that the former government minister Michael Lowry may have suggested to Mr O’Brien that he team up with France Telecom in his bid for the State’s second mobile phone licence.
A fax sent by Mr O’Brien on April 5th, 1995, to Mr Prelz was read out. One paragraph reads: “France Telecom – The minister spoke to me yesterday and suggested I contact France Telecom as they have no partner, and I am meeting them tonight for dinner.”
Tribunal counsel Jacqueline O’Brien SC told Mr Prelz that Mr Lowry, the then minister for transport, energy and communications, had in fact met Mr O’Brien the previous day at a telecoms conference.
Mr O’Brien met representatives of the French company in Paris for dinner but did not conclude any deal with them.
He eventually submitted a bid with Norwegian company Telenor, with the bid including a statement that Mr Prelz’s company, Advent International, had made a commitment to invest up to £30 million in Mr O’Brien’s company, Communicorp, if the consortium, Esat Digifone, won the licence.
The tribunal is hearing evidence from Mr Prelz as part of its inquiry into the nature of the commitment made by Advent.
The licence bids were submitted on August 4th.
On October 3rd, 1995, when the licence bids were being assessed by officials in Mr Lowry’s department as part of a sealed process, Mr O’Brien sent another fax to Mr Prelz which read in part: “As I explained to you at our meeting yesterday and telephone conversation last week, your letter to Telenor and the Irish authorities did not satisfy them.”
Mr O’Brien wrote that he was making “alternative arrangements”.
The tribunal is investigating the circumstances whereby Dermot Desmond’s IIU Ltd became a 20 per cent shareholder in Esat while the bids were being assessed. IIU also became a financial backer of Communicorp.
Ms O’Brien said the tribunal had been told that Mr O’Brien said to Per Simmonsen of Telenor that he had met Mr Lowry in a pub and that Mr Lowry had told him that Mr Desmond should be involved in the Esat bid.
Mr Prelz said he was never told of this meeting, and would have remembered it if he was told, as his firm was very aware at the time of the US laws on foreign corruption.
Mr Prelz told the tribunal that a letter from Advent that was used as part of the bid constituted a “binding, irrevocable, enforceable obligation and commitment” to provide finance to Communicorp.
He was asked by Ms O’Brien about a note written by the then Communicorp director Peter O’Donoghue in 1995, in which he wrote that Mr Prelz had “stated that the word ‘committed’ was misleading and that the fact was that there was no offer as no terms were agreed”.
Mr Prelz said that his dealings with Mr O’Brien sometimes involved “shadow boxing” as part of ongoing negotiations.
Mr Lowry and his accountant, Denis O’Connor, were among those in the public gallery yesterday afternoon.