Lowry avoids most of tribunal case costs

MICHAEL Lowry has been awarded 80% of the estimated €400,000 legal costs linked to a challenge to the Moriarty Tribunal, a court has ruled.

The former minister had last week won an appeal court bid to avoid a ‘swingeing’ legal bill of about €5million relating to his part in the payments-to-politicians inquiry.

This was even though he was criticised by Moriarty for ‘knowingly providing the tribunal with false information’, the court heard.

The tribunal had told Mr Lowry to pay the multi-million bill but appeal judges decided last week the tribunal was not entitled to ‘penalise’ him with costs over his behaviour while being investigated by Moriarty.

Yesterday, the TD’s lawyers asked the Court of Appeal not to land him with the costs of an eight-day case challenging that tribunal costs order and other matters.

The former Fine Gael minister had spent 15 years ‘engaging’ with the tribunal between 1997 and 2012 and ‘had to do so from his own resources’, his barrister Niamh Hyland SC told appeal judges yesterday.

Tribunal lawyers said Mr Lowry should be ordered to pay 50% of the legal bill for the eight-day challenge, saying this would be ‘no injustice’ to the Independent TD.

Shane Murphy SC, for Moriarty, said that while Mr Lowry won his bid to avoid paying tribunal costs, he had failed in his ‘attack, frontal or collateral’ on the tribunal’s findings of ‘non-cooperation’ against him.

The three appeal judges awarded Mr Lowry 80% of his costs for his legal battle.