A donation of $50,000 was made on behalf of Esat Digifone to Fine Gael some two months after the company had won a competition for Ireland’s second mobile phone licence, according to the Moriarty tribunal report.
It says that Michael Lowry was minister for communications and a Fine Gael TD at the time but that he did not personally benefit from the transaction.
The December 1995 donation was “ostensibly” made towards a Fine Gael fundraising dinner promoted by the late businessman David Austin, who was an associate of Mr Lowry and Denis O’Brien, and held in New York a month earlier.
The donation was made by Esat's Norwegian partners, Telenor, but was later reimbursed by Mr O'Brien's company, Esat.
The report says that, following a conversation with Mr O’Brien in December 1995, Telenor executive Arve Johansen contacted Mr Austin and then received an invoice for $50,000 for “consultancy services” and a direction to pay the sum into a Bank of Ireland account in Jersey.
Telenor subsequently recovered the sum after sending a number of invoices to Esat.
Mr Austin informed then-taoiseach John Bruton of the Esat donation but was told the party could not accept a payment from the source following the recent granting of the licence to the company.
The money remained in Mr Austin’s account but was later transferred to party supporter Frank Conroy for transmission to Fine Gael and described as the balance of funds raised in connection with the New York fundraiser. He received a cheque, payable to himself, for the Irish pound equivalent of $50,000.
Telenor and Esat subsequently decided it should be established that the $50,000 had been received by Fine Gael and not Mr Lowry, so as to exclude the possibility he had benefited personally from the donation, the report said.
Fine Gael later returned the payment to Telenor by cheque and this was passed on to Mr O’Brien before being returned to Fine Gael following “a fractious course of dealings” between Esat shareholders.
The report says that following media reports in 2001, which brought the matter to the attention of the tribunal for the first time, Fine Gael issued a bank draft covering the funds that ended up with Esat Digifone.
The payment is described in the report as being “in essence a political donation to Fine Gael”, the transmission of which to the party was “secretive, utterly lacking in transparency, and designed to conceal the fact of such payment, by or on behalf of the donors”.
“The tribunal has found that the payment, although not one ever intended for Mr Lowry personally, was nonetheless one that technically falls within its terms of reference and was a payment to Fine Gael, on behalf of Esat Digifone, at the instigation and promotion of Mr Denis O’Brien.”
