O'Brien said firm would remain 'Irish controlled'

The fact that Esat Digifone was an Irish-controlled company and would remain so was emphasised by Mr Denis O'Brien when he was competing for the State's second mobile phone licence in 1995.

During a meeting with members of the committee which was to select the winning bid for the licence, Mr O'Brien said the business "will be, remain Irish-controlled". Esat Digifone was sold to BT in January 2000.

Mr O'Brien told the 1995 meeting, a tape of which was played to the tribunal yesterday, that some of the equity in his company, Communicorp, was to be sold to venture capital company Advent International, but that the voting power within Communicorp would remain with the Irish shareholders.

The consortium seeking the licence, Esat Digifone, was owned equally by Communicorp and Norwegian company Telenor. Communicorp was subsequently replaced by another company run by Mr O'Brien, Esat Telecom.

Mr O'Brien said Communicorp's goal, while seeking funding, "is that the company would remain Irish and that's the reason why, you know, we have insisted on these voting requirements for the Irish investors, that they have three times the votes Advent have".

If it won the licence, Esat Digifone was to place 20 per cent of its shares with four institutions: Advent, AIB, Bank of Ireland, and Standard Life Ireland. "It's likely that the Irish institutions will probably go into a vehicle together just for simplicity there would be that 20 per cent block so the Irish institutions would again control that block effectively."

Mr O'Brien also said that, in time, the two partners in Digifone would place shares through the Dublin stock exchange. "That would mean that the Irish investors, institutional investors and the public, would" have an increased share of the consortium. "So, you know, you have even a greater Irish content going forward.

"The main thing from our point of view is that the company maintains - is an Irish company."

At the end of the meeting Mr O'Brien asked what would happen next, given that the consortium had been told not to send in any further material for the selection committee to review. In the event, a document stating that Advent and the other institutions had been replaced by Mr Dermot Desmond's IIU Ltd was sent to the committee. It was returned.

Following the playing of the tape of the three-hour meeting with Digifone, the tribunal began to play the tape of the meeting with the Persona consortium. Persona came second in the competition after Digifone.

Before moving on to this tape the chairman, Mr Justice Moriarty, said that listening to the tapes was an "atrophied process" but the tribunal was a public process and it was felt that the playing of the tapes was appropriate. He told the five teams of lawyers attending the tribunal that they should not feel they had to sit through the playing of the tapes if they had some more "pulsating demand" on their time.

The Persona representatives, in their presentation, emphasised the size of the operation of consortium member Motorola in the Irish economy at the time. One representative, speaking on the subject of planning permission for masts which would be needed around the State, said: "Not even God can guarantee planning permission in this country."