A LIFE LIVED NEVER FAR AWAY FROM CONTROVERSY AND SCANDAL

OVER his three decades in public life, Michael Lowry has never been far from controversy or scandal. Born and raised in North Tipperary, he attended CBS Thurles before getting a job as an apprentice refrigeration engineer with Butler Refrigeration – one of whose top clients was controversial businessman Ben Dunne.

Elected to North Tipperary County Council in 1979, and in 1987, he was added to the Fine Gael ticket for the general election. He left Butler Refrigeration for good – but soon started up a new company, Garuda, which by 1989 was doing all the refrigeration work for Dunnes Stores.

It was his corporation tax returns while running this company in the early Noughties that formed the basis of his conviction yesterday.

There was a further storm after Lowry snapped up a home in Holycross, Co. Tipperary, and Ben Dunne’s builders did IR£395,107 worth of improvement works on it. The McCracken Tribunal would later find that the supermarket tycoon paid for the extension to Lowry’s home – and concluded that the payment was designed to help Lowry evade tax.

In 1993, Lowry became chairman of the Fine Gael parliamentary party. He became minister for transport, energy and communications a year later, serving as transport minister in the Fine Gael-led Rainbow Coalition from December 1994 to November 1996.

Having resigned from Fine Gael after a series of controversies, he ran as an Independent in the 1997 general election.

Also, by 1997, he was caught up in the Moriarty paymentsto-politicians inquiry at Dublin Castle, which found in 2011 that Lowry had ‘secured the winning’ of the 1995 mobile licence for billionaire Denis O’Brien’s Esat Digifone.

Judge Michael Moriarty found the relationship between Mr O’Brien and Lowry during the bid represented ‘an irregular and improper relationship between business and politics’.

Judge Moriarty identified two payments to Lowry by Mr O’Brien subsequent to the award, in 1996 and 1999, of Stg£147,000 and Stg£300,000, equivalent to more than €500,000. He said the payments were ‘demonstrably referable to the acts and conduct of Lowry’ during the licence process.

The judge remarked that neither Lowry nor Mr O’Brien saw ‘fit to respond to the tribunal’s inquiries openly and honestly’.

Lowry’s actions in influencing the award of the State’s lucrative second mobile phone licence for tycoon Denis O’Brien were ‘disgraceful’ and ‘insidious’, the tribunal found. Lowry gave Mr O’Brien ‘substantive information of significant value and assistance in securing the licence’, Judge Moriarty said.

Lowry had engaged in a ‘cynical and venal abuse of office’ Moriarty found.

Mr O’Brien and Lowry have both repeatedly rejected the report’s findings.

Lowry was later criticised by Moriarty for ‘knowingly providing the tribunal with false information’ and was ordered in October 2013 to pay a €5million legal bill.

Justice Moriarty rounded on Lowry for using offshore accounts to avoid paying tax and said that his tax avoidance fell ‘far below what could reasonably be expected from a holder of public office’. He also said Lowry used offshore accounts to shield income ‘from the gaze of both Revenue and the Central Bank’.

Lowry launched a series of legal challenges to the tribunal’s decision, from 2015 onwards, and finally won his case to avoid paying any costs at the Court of Appeal in March of this year.

In 2016, he launched a High Court offensive to stop his tax trial going ahead, claiming he couldn’t get a fair trial because he’d been the victim of an unfair ‘media campaign’ against him.

He claimed the prosecution was ‘pointless’ and a ‘waste of public money’, but he lost that case and he finally stood trial in the criminal courts this month.