My 23-year battle to expose the venality of Lucky Lowry
MICHAEL LOWRY is a liar. Not a spoofer given to flights of fancy or exaggerations: no, the disgraced former minister is a pants-on-fire liar. Lowry’s claim to be vindicated by guilty verdicts after a 12-day trial in Dublin Circuit Criminal Court this week was a narcissistic fabrication. And the three-year ban on him acting as a company director and a fine of €25,000 for two tax offences are the consequences of his venality.
His most outrageous whopper was in the Dáil, a forum where members are on their honour to tell the truth. It was in the late afternoon of the Dáil’s last sitting before Christmas 1996, when he made a statement explaining how Dunnes Stores diverting IR£395,000 to refurbish his home was not a secret payment to him.
‘If someone were trying to hide income, would he or she not be more likely to put it in an offshore account?’ said Lowry. At the time Lowry had two offshore accounts in the Isle of Man and another, jointly held with his children, in Jersey.
That, I believe, was a cynical and shameless lie.
In that infamous Dáil speech, Lowry also revealed that when he was appointed a minister he had to tell the Taoiseach he had availed of a tax amnesty the year before. Nearly a decade later he had to make a €1.45m settlement with Revenue to settle an outstanding tax demand that arose from secret payments to him from Ben Dunne.
I can call Lowry a liar and a tax cheat because the President of the High Court said I could, in 2012, when Judge Nicholas Kearns dismissed an appeal by Lowry who had sued me for libel.
On a television programme I had said that Lowry had been caught with his ‘hand in the till’ – and in a newspaper article I had referred to €5m in property deals being investigated by the Moriarty Tribunal.
Judge Kearns said the newspaper article could have been pointing out a tribunal’s investigations into a possible link between the property transactions and Lowry’s awarding of the phone licence.
‘The phrase “hand in till”,’ said Judge Kearns, ‘could have referred to the bills inappropriately picked up for Lowry’s benefit by his business interests, and his failure to pay tax on that amount.’
He added: ‘It seems clear that the defendant [the defendant being me, Sam Smyth] has a good, arguable case in respect of both publications.’
Judge Kearns also noted that Lowry had not joined either Independent Newspapers or TV3 in his defamation action against me. It is highly unusual for a plaintiff in a libel action to sue an individual journalist who would rarely have funds to pay any award that the court may order or cover a winning plaintiff’s legal costs.
LOWRY took his first libel action against me personally in 1995 when he was a government minister and I was investigating him. This action arose out of remarks I made on an RTÉ broadcast. But he didn’t pursue the case when he had to resign as a minister after I revealed that Dunnes Stores had secretly paid for the refurbishment of his house.
I have a history with Lowry: some 23 years ago, I suspected he was a liar and a cheat and since then he has done everything he can to stop me reporting my suspicions of him. I am proud to have chronicled the rise and fall of this arrogant and ruthless man who has besmirched Irish public life for the past generation.
Those of us who kept track of the scandals uncovered by the Moriarty Tribunal took note of a mysterious character, Kevin Phelan, who made a guest appearance in Lowry’s recent criminal trial.
A £248,624 payment made through Lowry to a bank account in the Isle of Man operated by a company owned by Phelan was never disclosed to the Moriarty Tribunal.
The payment was referred to in a secret recording Phelan had made of a conversation with Lowry: ‘If that comes out I’m f***ed,’ said Lowry.
The payment was an integral part of the money and property trail followed by the tribunal investigating Lowry’s awarding of the second mobile phone licence to Denis O’Brien’s Esat Digifone. At the end of his 15-year investigation, Judge Moriarty found: Lowry ‘secured the winning’ of the 1995 mobile licence for O’Brien. O’Brien made two payments to Lowry in 1996 and 1999 totalling IR£500,000 and supported a loan of GB£420,000 given to Lowry in 1999, the equivalent to a payment of nearly £1m. Lowry imparted substantive information to O’Brien that was ‘of significant value and assistance to him [O’Brien] in securing the licence’. Lowry bypassed consideration by his Cabinet colleagues and thereby not only influenced but delivered the result for East Digifone. The chairman further criticised Lowry for his ‘cynical and venal abuse of office’ and his brazen refusal to acknowledge the impropriety of his financial arrangements with O’Brien and Dunne.
Both Lowry and O’Brien vehemently dispute the tribunal’s findings, although neither challenged them in the courts.
But another finding by Judge Moriarty fascinated me: that Lowry tried to help Ben Dunne double the annual rent (from £450,000 to £900,000) of Telecom headquarters – a building owned by Dunne and for which Lowry had ministerial responsibility.
THE tribunal was told that auctioneer Mark FitzGerald, the son of former taoiseach Dr Garret FitzGerald, had refused to cooperate with Lowry – both were on Fine Gael’s board of trustees in April 1995 and Lowry was chairman. Mark FitzGerald said Lowry asked him to organise for an arbitrator from his company, Sherry FitzGerald, to agree with the doubling of the rent. FitzGerald said he told Lowry emphatically that he could not and then Lowry asked him what ‘we’ are going to do as Ben Dunne had donated £170,000 to Fine Gael.
Lowry disputed his fellow trustee’s recollection and said it was ‘neither fair or correct’ to suggest he had tried to influence the (rent) review; but the chairman believed
FitzGerald’s evidence. In his final report, Judge Moriarty found that rent increases at Telecom headquarters would have improperly enriched Dunne and were deemed to be ‘profoundly corrupt’.
The devastating ‘profoundly corrupt’ finding cast a new light on Lowry’s dealings as a trustee, chairman, chief fundraiser and latter-day saviour of Fine Gael.
Back in 1991, Fine Gael had debts of £1.3m and then-leader John Bruton was grateful when their new TD in north Tipperary, Michael Lowry, offered to help. He introduced Bruton to Dunne and money from Dunne flowed into Fine Gael via Lowry.
When the 1992 election was called, Lowry was indispensible to the party leader. During the campaign Lowry used Dunne’s largesse to buy influence with Bruton’s most likely successors as leader: Michael Noonan got £3,000 and another £1,000 a year later. He delivered £5,000 in cash for Ivan Yates.
A leadership crisis sparked off by a disastrous election result when Fine Gael lost 10 seats was averted when Lowry was elected chairman of the party’s trustees.
But it was going into government in 1994 that saved Fine Gael – and it was the making, then the breaking – of Michael Lowry who was the party’s key negotiator. ‘Lucky’ – his new nickname – Lowry was the new taoiseach’s closest adviser and was rewarded with a plum appointment: minister for transport, energy and communications.
Lowry’s ministerial Mercedes was smaller than his own top of the range BMW and his period home in Holycross was lavishly refurbished complete with gold bathroom fittings and elaborately ornate gates from a former Church of Ireland oratory. He was openly touted as the next leader of Fine Gael.
In government, Lowry declared war on what he called ‘Sicilian levels of corruption’ in semi-state companies and said he had received anonymous letters saying he had been put under surveillance. I got wind of the sensational story. I asked Lowry and he said the gardaí were aware of it and he asked me to hold off writing about it because of the delicate personal matter – but, he assured me, I would get the exclusive the following Tuesday.
Four days later a Sunday newspaper had this front-page story: ‘The Taoiseach has been told that the Transport and Communications Minister Michael Lowry is under surveillance by criminal elements attempting to prevent hisclampdown on corruption in the semi-state sector.’
Gardaí were suspicious of the story and issued a Jesuitical statement saying it is not illegal to put anyone, including a government minister under surveillance, so no law was broken. It emerged later that private detectives were watching someone Lowry spent a lot of time with socially and therefore the minister had never been the target of any surveillance.
Crucially, there was no threat to the minister. I was told the private detectives involved were former gardaí who had informed their former bosses at Garda headquarters of the circumstances.
MY investigations also confirmed that Lowry was something of a lothario: his aftershave (it smelled like Africa by Lynx) was overpowering; he dyed his hair and was seen in the company of what some of his more prescriptive colleagues called ‘party girls’.
Still, Lucky Lowry was master of all he surveyed and launched the bidding process for the most lucrative contract in the history of the Irish state – the second mobile phone licence.
But after a lap of honour with the winner, Denis O’Brien, Lowry’s past overtook his latest personal triumph – and his political ambitions.
I was facing professional ruin and my family home was at risk from the personal libel writ Lowry had served on me when I secured documentary evidence that Dunnes Stores had paid for the refurbishment of his house.
Dunnes Stores had arranged for the hundreds of thousands it spent on Lowry’s house to be recorded in the company accounts as building work done to its outlet in Dublin’s Ilac Centre. The story was published and Lowry resigned, first as minister then as a member of Fine Gael.
After that, the McCracken and the Moriarty Tribunals spent 15 years investigating him and reached damning conclusions. Most notable for me was the ‘profoundly corrupt’ finding about his dealings as a minister with his political sugar daddy Ben Dunne.
Still, Lowry is currently a poll-topping TD and wealthy businessman driving a top-ofthe-range BMW and living way beyond our means. And despite this week’s criminal convictions, he still shamelessly portrays himself as a victim.
Still shamelessly potrays himself as a victim