Moriarty tribunal:Former government minister Michael Lowry told the tribunal he had no connection with the stg£3.8 million Doncaster Rovers transaction.
Mr Lowry began giving evidence on the matter yesterday afternoon, in what the chairman, Mr Justice Michael Moriarty, said would be Mr Lowry's last appearance before the 10-year-old tribunal.
The tribunal is investigating whether Mr Lowry had any involvement with the 1998 purchase of Doncaster Rovers Football Club Ltd. The company owns the lease on the Doncaster football grounds. Denis O'Brien has said the transaction was exclusively his.
The tribunal's inquiries into the matter began after a report in January 2003 in The Irish Times. The report disclosed the existence of a letter written in September 1998 by an English solicitor who acted in the transaction, Christopher Vaughan.
The letter was addressed to Mr Lowry's home in Co Tipperary and in it Mr Vaughan stated that he had not until then understood Mr Lowry's "total involvement" in the Doncaster matter.
Mr Lowry told Jerry Healy SC that he was "blue in the face telling anybody who's willing to listen that I never received that letter". He said the letter could not have been written to him as he had no connection with the Doncaster transaction. He could not, as stated in the letter, have taken documents concerning Doncaster from his meeting with Mr Vaughan (about a separate property transaction). He said he believed the letter was intended for someone else.
Mr Healy said Mr Vaughan had informed the tribunal that he had sent the letter. "I certainly never received it," said Mr Lowry. Mr Vaughan has not agreed to come to Dublin to give evidence on the matter.
How Mr Vaughan could have come to write the letter, he simply did not know, Mr Lowry said. "That letter is simply not correct." Mr Lowry was also asked about a letter from Mr Vaughan to an accountant acting for the O'Brien family trust in the Isle of Man, in which Mr Vaughan said that at one stage he had been told by Northern Irish businessman Kevin Phelan that Mr Lowry was involved in a British Virgin Islands trust, the Glebe trust, which had an interest in the Doncaster transaction.
Mr Phelan, who set up the Glebe trust and had an interest in it, was involved in setting up and managing the Doncaster deal.
Mr Lowry, speaking forcefully, said he had never heard of the trust until told about it by the tribunal. He never had any dealings with the trust and wanted to know if the tribunal had tried to ascertain from the trust whether he was linked to it. "I am a bit tired of accusations being made about me that are without foundation," he said. "I would like the tribunal to make inquiries and to clear my name about involvement with the Glebe trust, because I never had any."
Mr Lowry also said that in 1992, when he was paid £25,000 by Bill Maher, of Maher Meats, for consultancy services, he had not known that Mr Maher was a business associate of Kevin Phelan. In 1998, when he began having property dealings with Mr Phelan in the UK, he had also not known that Mr Maher and Mr Phelan were business associates.
Mr Lowry continues his evidence today.
