Fine Gael have questions to answer
BY MICHAEL PIERSE
Lauded by the establishment as an example of entrepreneurial genius and persistence, Denis O'Brien's sale of his stake in Esat Digifone last year landed him a whopping £238 million. He was on the cusp of a wave that swelled from the decision of a Fine Gael-led coalition government in 1995 to grant Esat the lucrative second mobile phone license for the 26 Counties.
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Fine Gael were quite happy to take £50,000 off Esat last year, yet they say they are still trying to give them back the $50,000 from 1995. Does this not sound fishy?
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Remember RTÉ's Pat Kenny fawning over a content-looking O'Brien on the Late Late Show? How great he was. How many hours he worked. How his staff just loved to work under a man of such capability, of such diligence. His windfall was the fruit of a masterpiece of tactics and business accumen. It was even a miracle - or was it?
O'Brien had good reason, from his perspective, to indulge his political friends following the Esat sale. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, the PDs and the Labour Party last year benefited to the sum of £50,000 each, the Labour Party being the only beneficiaries to refuse the contribution. These contributions were not kept secret. O'Brien's money was made.
The current controversy surrounding O'Brien, Fine Gael and the Norwegian Telecommunications company Telenor, goes back to 1995, when Esat's launch in Ireland was dependent on the nod of disgraced former Fine Gael TD Michael Lowry. Oh, and a game of pass-the-parcel with a separate donation of $50,000 that O'Brien says he never played.
O'Brien is strongly denying any knowledge whatsoever of the $50,000 donated to Fine Gael in 1995 by his former business partner, Telenor. This runs contrary to claims from that same company that though they conveyed it, it was not them, but O'Brien's company, Esat, that splashed out on the Fine Gael gift. In fact, Telenor has stated that the donation had guaranteed Esat two tables at a Fine Gael corporate fundraising event in New York that year, seats they never took.
Central to this fiasco is the granting of the lucrative second mobile phone license in the 26 Counties, two months previous to the passing on of the said donation and under the auspices of a Fine Gael-led coalition government.
Fine Gael supporter and former Smurfit executive, David Austen, was the middle man. He originally received the $50,000 two months after the granting of the second mobile license, though, mysteriously, he didn't pass it on until May 1997. The then Fine Gael secretary accepted the donation as a direct contribution from Austen, only finding out the true source of the donation in 1998, they claim. Austen has since passed away.
O'Brien says Telenor made the donation, though he admits having reimbursed them for it. Telenor say they advanced the donation on O'Brien's instruction, contrary to his claim that he knew nothing of it. Fine Gael say that they pleaded with Esat to take the donation back, but that Denis O'Brien wouldn't accept it. As this article goes to print, the party are still trying to rid themselves of the money, they say. Fine Gael were quite happy to take £50,000 off Esat last year, yet they were still trying to give them back the $50,000 from 1995, the party claim.
This all seem a bit fishy? Read on.
The granting of the Esat license did not pass without criticism in 1995. In the same way as Ray Burke caused controversy, and later a public accounts committee investigation, by his granting of a cheap license to Century Radio, the granting of the Esat license came with the controversial recommendation from the 26-County Department of Transport, Energy and Communications that the company pay no more than a modest £15 million. Esat's competitors were incensed. So much so that several of them made formal complaints to the European Commission about the 26-County government's execution of the tendering process. The Commission failed to uphold any of these complaints.
Michael Lowry, the Fine Gael minister for communications at the time, resigned from the party in 1996, after it emerged that he accepted an undisclosed political donation in the form of an extension to his lavish Tipperary home. Following the 1995 controversy, demands were made of Lowry to publish the report of consultants employed by his department to advise it on the license-tendering process. Lowry declined, on grounds that to do so would require releasing `sensitive information'.
When Lowry resigned, his successor, Alan Dukes, was reported as having conducted an investigation into the granting of the license to Esat. While this supposedly extensive investigation found that the procedures used in the tendering process were above board, it now appears that the `extensive investigation' suggested by reports consisted of little more than a discussion between Dukes and the Secretary General of his department.
other interesting factor in this is the involvement in Esat of Jim Mitchell, Fine Gael's new deputy leader and chairperson of the anti-corruption Leinster House Public Accounts Committee. A former communications minister himself, he was employed by the company as a consultant during the processing of their tender for the mobile license in 1995. Still working with Esat, he denies any knowledge of the donation.
Last year on the Late Late Show interview, O'Brien said that his company was in such a financial bad patch at the time the license was granted that it was in danger of bankruptcy. Did Mitchell's `consultancy' help them out of a bad patch? The Fine Gael decision would seem like an act of charity - except we all know that in business and establishment politics there is little room for charity.
Just as Fine Gael's new leader, Michael Noonan, has scambled to the top of Mount High Moral Ground and chastised Fianna Fáil for their trail of brown envelopes and rezoned land, he and his party are now facing a number of significant questions. The versions of events given by that party, Denis O'Brien and Telenor are so fundamentally at odds that there is no doubt that someone is lying.
Fine Gael must answer a number of key questions:
• If Austen's fundraising had secured Esat two tables at the party's corporate bash in New York, how can they claim that they thought it was a personal donation from Austen and that they were not aware of the money's origins until 1998 - when corruption became a hot political issue?
• Why did they not immediately reveal the donation to the Moriarty Tribunal, as appropriate?
• Is their new policy of accepting single donations of no more than £1,000 only going to mean that there will be more David Austens acting as piggy in the middle for big corporate donations?
• Are Noonan and Co. Inc. now going to try to shift the blame onto former leader John Bruton and disgraced TD Michael Lowry?
• Who do they think they're kidding?
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