"Anxious wait for some as Moriarty report nears publication"

[Eamonnca1]

Have any of you had a look at O'Brien's wikipedia page lately? Could have been written by the fella himself, the only thing missing is the nine-inch-dick claim.

What I find the most interesting about wikipedia pages isn't so much the articles themselves but the discussion pages behind them and the editing history. You can see some real pitch battles being fought over what should be included and not included. On O'Brien's article it's basically a big w**k-fest over the man himself, but then somebody's dumped the Moriarty stuff in there, and then the "citation police" have come in littering it with "citation needed" tags every time something negative about him appears.  That sort of thing can be counter-productive though because editors on the other side will just go off and get citations and add them in, making the article even stronger.

someone probably has been appointed to a full time role with the specific responsibility of looking after DO'Bs wiki page.

It's obvious that he really hankers after the respect of his D4 peers, why else would he care?  He took the tax free €300m he made from Digifone and it's from there that his real success story starts, he has done brilliantly, he's turned that €300m into €2.5Bn.

If only the Criminal Assets Bureau could get their hands on a slice of that action.

[Eamonnca1]

Speak of the divil:

CAB head to review tribunal's report

By Tom Brady Security Editor

Friday March 25 2011

THE head of the Criminal Assets Bureau has been appointed to review the findings of the Moriarty Tribunal report to determine if there is a basis for a criminal investigation.

Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan yesterday appointed Detective Chief Superintendent Eugene Corcoran to oversee a study of the massive report, which runs to 2,400 pages.

The move follows the decision of Taoiseach Enda Kenny on Wednesday that copies of the report should be sent to the Garda Commissioner and the DPP.

The copies were on their desks yesterday morning and Chief Supt Corcoran was immediately tasked with heading up a small team of officers to carry out the review.

Gardai are aware that under the terms of the tribunals legislation they are prohibited from using any of the evidence given to Moriarty unless they can establish independent verification of the details.

However, they will be able to use the findings to help plot a way forward.

[seafoid]

I really miss the Sunday Tribune for stories like this. 

[Bogball XV]

I really miss the Sunday Tribune for stories like this.

I don't think Shane Coleman the former political editor of the Tribune would be writing too many complimentary pieces on the tribunal findings, he's been damning of moriarty and the tribunal process all week in his new position as Newstalk's political correspondent.  I'll admit it's a bit of an about turn, but, when one has just lost one job and the mortgage needs paying, it's understandable, if disappointing.

[Eamonnca1]

I really miss the Sunday Tribune for stories like this.

I don't think Shane Coleman the former political editor of the Tribune would be writing too many complimentary pieces on the tribunal findings, he's been damning of moriarty and the tribunal process all week in his new position as Newstalk's political correspondent.  I'll admit it's a bit of an about turn, but, when one has just lost one job and the mortgage needs paying, it's understandable, if disappointing.

Isn't Newstalk part of INM in which O'Brien is the biggest shareholder?

[Ulick]

Vincent Browne fairly made the fool out of him the other night.

[An Gaeilgoir]

Have any of you had a look at O'Brien's wikipedia page lately? Could have been written by the fella himself, the only thing missing is the nine-inch-dick claim.

What I find the most interesting about wikipedia pages isn't so much the articles themselves but the discussion pages behind them and the editing history. You can see some real pitch battles being fought over what should be included and not included. On O'Brien's article it's basically a big w**k-fest over the man himself, but then somebody's dumped the Moriarty stuff in there, and then the "citation police" have come in littering it with "citation needed" tags every time something negative about him appears.  That sort of thing can be counter-productive though because editors on the other side will just go off and get citations and add them in, making the article even stronger.

someone probably has been appointed to a full time role with the specific responsibility of looking after DO'Bs wiki page.

It's obvious that he really hankers after the respect of his D4 peers, why else would he care?  He took the tax free €300m he made from Digifone and it's from there that his real success story starts, he has done brilliantly, he's turned that €300m into €2.5Bn.

If only the Criminal Assets Bureau could get their hands on a slice of that action.

Was speaking to someone in the know yesterday. It seems CAB have already been investigating behind the scenes for the past 12-18 months. Fingers crossed.

[seafoid]

I really miss the Sunday Tribune for stories like this.

I don't think Shane Coleman the former political editor of the Tribune would be writing too many complimentary pieces on the tribunal findings, he's been damning of moriarty and the tribunal process all week in his new position as Newstalk's political correspondent.  I'll admit it's a bit of an about turn, but, when one has just lost one job and the mortgage needs paying, it's understandable, if disappointing.

I saved a load of Shane Coleman articles as the situation deteriorated until the IMF came in. He just parrots whatever the official line is. But he was more of an exception at the Tribune.

[seafoid]

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/1019/1224281440930.html

Let's think about what remains, collectively, within our own control: our political culture and system; our public ethics and values; our health, education and pension systems; our legal impunity for white-collar criminals; our lack of civic pride; the very passivity that makes us powerless. It is still within our power to shape a decent society. If we don't believe that, what have we to look forward to but life in this hole?

[muppet]

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2011/0326/1224293121760.html

(EDIT: Right link, wrong text which was from Seafoid's link above.)

FINTAN O'TOOLE

The bullish behaviour of Michael Lowry, Denis O'Brien and Ben Dunne this week was that of men who know they have nothing to fear, as borne out by previous tribunals

THE MOST potent force for revelation in Irish politics is the man whom Charles Haughey, with all the emotion conjured by the receipt of huge bank drafts, affectionately called "Big Fella". Ben Dunne's big mouth and sudden impulses have made him the wild card in the game of power. A culture of quiet influence and tacit understandings is best maintained by discreet accountants and confidential lawyers. But discretion is not in the Big Fella's nature.

Big Ben's big mouth was open again on Tuesday. Almost as soon as Mr Justice Moriarty issued his final report, the man whose dealings with Haughey and Michael Lowry have kept him employed since 1997 was on the airwaves. While Lowry and Denis O'Brien were attacking Moriarty with phrases whose similarity suggested a well-rehearsed PR campaign, Dunne did the last thing a handler would want him to. He talked to Joe. And talked and talked. And as he ranted on to Joe Duffy, he spilled out truths that are just as significant as the forensic accumulation of complex detail that Moriarty had unveiled.

Denis O'Brien had spent a great deal of time and money preparing for the day when Moriarty would publish the findings of almost a decade of hearings into his victory in the 1995 competition for Ireland's second mobile-phone licence. The sophistication and forethought involved can be judged simply by typing moriartytribunal.com into a web browser. It takes you not to the tribunal's website but to one "created by Mr Denis O'Brien to help explain and expose the inner workings of the Moriarty Tribunal".

O'Brien, who wields vast influence through his ownership of both independent national talk-radio stations and his large shareholding in the Independent newspaper group, has not sought to defend himself. His strategy is to attack. The position articulated by Denis O'Brien and Michael Lowry is that they are innocent victims of a monstrous conspiracy. O'Brien went so far as to suggest not merely that Justice Moriarty had adopted a "preconceived position" before hearing the evidence but that the entire judiciary had conspired to protect and support him. This is consistent with Lowry's view, in a statement released last year, that Moriarty was "intent on destroying my character, shredding the reputation of the Irish civil servants and damaging the international image of the Irish State". Not only is there no scandal in relation to Lowry's role in the awarding of the phone licence to O'Brien, but everyone is allegedly missing a far bigger scandal.

A judge regarded as the epitome of judicial sobriety and propriety has gone rogue and become obsessed with destroying Ireland's international reputation. Instead of reining him in, his colleagues have conspired to allow him to bring his evil plan to fruition. If the best form of defence is attack, this is an aerial bombardment with preposterous allegations.

This strategy of painting O'Brien and Lowry as innocent victims of what the latter calls "State oppression" depended on one thing: the implausibility of the very idea that Lowry might be open to improper influence.

Unfortunately Ben Dunne went on air and revealed two things to listeners: his absolute conviction that he has never been involved in corruption and his belief that it was, and still is, perfectly fine in Ireland for a rich man to lift the phone to a minister and expect to get things done.

Ben Dunne paid Charles Haughey more than €2 million. Haughey in return helped the Dunne group reduce its tax bill by a whopping £23 million. Dunne also colluded with Michael Lowry's organised evasion of taxes. And, as Moriarty found this week, he asked Lowry to attempt to get a State-owned company to double the rent it paid to him for his office block, Marlborough House. Yet he told Joe Duffy, "I done absolutely nothing wrong in any of my dealings."

He seemed genuinely outraged at the notion that giving huge bungs to a taoiseach and keeping a compliant cabinet minister on a financial leash could be wrong.

That his upset was genuine was obvious. His defence against Moriarty's finding of corruption in relation to Marlborough House is not that he wouldn't dream of asking a minister to interfere with the rental arrangements of a State company. It is that the interference he demanded was merely to speed up the process of an independent, quasi-judicial review conducted by the auctioneer Mark FitzGerald. He saw the whole thing as a simple matter of political connections: "I phoned Lowry . . . I knew he knew Mark FitzGerald and Sherry FitzGerald were doing the review. I said, 'Michael, you know Mark FitzGerald. I don't know him. They're doing a rent review. Will you ever get it speeded up?' "

Not only was this fine then, it is fine now: "In my days, and even these days, ministers still take phone calls – if you know them well . . . I would have phoned a minister within the last year or so [on] a private matter."

In one way Dunne's unguarded admissions are shocking, but in another they merely confirm the weary belief that this is the way things are done in Ireland.

In the case of Michael Lowry, after all, it should be news to no one that he behaved abysmally in public office. Even before the Moriarty tribunal was set up, certain facts about Lowry had been established. There is no dispute about three things: that Lowry misled the Dáil in 1996, when he gave the impression that he had no offshore bank accounts; that he misled the Revenue Commissioners when he availed of the tax amnesty of 1993 without declaring all of his hidden income; and that he colluded with Ben Dunne to evade taxes, creating, as the McCracken report put it, an "appalling situation that Mr Lowry consistently benefited from the black economy from shortly after his election to the Dáil" in 1987.

We already knew, therefore, that when he was chairman of Fine Gael's parliamentary party and its chief fundraiser and when he was, as minister, overseeing the awarding of the most lucrative licence ever issued by the State, he was showing contempt for both the truth and the law of the land.

We knew, too, that he had a taste for labyrinthine and secretive financial meanderings: McCracken referred to his use of arrangements "whereby large sums of money would be paid to him personally in a clandestine manner". Far from it being inherently implausible that a man with such low standards would try to take personal advantage of his power over a licence that was worth billions, it seems improbable that he would not.

And yet Lowry, O'Brien and Dunne are in a position to benefit from a grotesque paradox. The question posed explicitly by O'Brien and Dunne this week was stunningly brazen but entirely apt: if all this is true, why am I not in jail? Both men ostentatiously welcomed the referral of the Moriarty report to the Director of Public Prosecutions. Dunne even suggested to Joe Duffy the appropriate sentence if he is found guilty of the "breathtaking" corruption that Moriarty accuses him of: "I should be put behind bars for a minimum of 10 years." It is safe to assume that neither man would welcome this course of action if he actually believed that a prosecution, still less a conviction, were at all likely.

By issuing their "come and get me" challenges, Dunne and O'Brien went to the heart of the great failure of the whole era of tribunals: impunity. This is the word that Judge McCracken used in his report 14 years ago when he suggested that "the most damaging aspect" of Lowry's behaviour was the "public perception that . . . a member of cabinet was able to ignore, and indeed cynically evade, both the taxation and exchange control laws of the State with impunity". That perception has not been diminished by two decades of tribunals and investigations. It has been massively strengthened. Up to a point, our era of inquiries has done the great public service of opening up the golden circles of money and influence that have had such a disastrous long-term effect on our economy and our society. But it could be argued that in one crucial respect, things have gone backwards. Before all of this, someone who was exploiting the system for personal advantage might have feared exposure.

THE BULLISH behaviour of Lowry, O'Brien and Dunne this week was that of men who know they have nothing to fear. We now know that, on the whole, exposure is not a mortal wound. It is just a passing fever.

Consider the fate of those who have been on the receiving end of adverse findings over the past 20 years. The first big scandal was the purchase in 1990 of the Johnston Mooney and O'Brien site in Ballsbridge by the State-owned Telecom Éireann, for more than twice what had been paid for it a year earlier. The report of the inspector, John Glackin, concluded that the people who ultimately had a financial interest in the transactions were the financiers Dermot Desmond and JP McManus and the developer Pat Doherty.

This conclusion (hotly contested by Dermot Desmond) did no one any great harm. Desmond went on to become a billionaire, and McManus is a popular philanthropist and racehorse owner.

The beef tribunal, which reported in 1994, made a series of astonishing findings against the Goodman International group, owned and controlled by Larry Goodman. Among them were a massive tax fraud, the systematic misappropriation of beef going into EU intervention schemes and the abuse of State export credit guarantees in Goodman's dealings with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In the subsequent Dáil debate, Michael McDowell asked the rhetorical question: "Will any of these people hang their Armani jackets on the back of a cell door in Mountjoy?"

The answer, of course, was no: the only person to be prosecuted as a result of the beef tribunal was Susan O'Keeffe, the journalist who uncovered the scandal in the first place. Not only that but, in the long term, Larry Goodman suffered no real damage. He regained control of his companies and is still one of the largest beef processors in Europe. In 2005 it was revealed that the EU, which had been defrauded by his company, was paying him €500,000 a year under the Single Farm Payment scheme. The following year, after the US invasion, the new Iraq government paid him $72 million he was owed by Saddam.

And so it goes. Charles Haughey's astonishing venality (he took in the equivalent of almost €50 million during his political career) was exposed by the McCracken and Moriarty tribunals. He was not prosecuted, either for evading tax on his vast secret income or for lying to the tribunals. Instead he was given a State funeral and hailed at his graveside by his successor Bertie Ahern as "a patriot to his fingertips". Many of the great and the good of Irish business were found by the Public Accounts Committee to have either colluded with or turned a blind eye to systematic tax evasion by the banks on whose boards they served. Not one of them suffered the slightest damage, even to their reputations in the business community.

No one was prosecuted for the Ansbacher Cayman scam, which encompassed a wide range of well-connected men, including a director of the Central Bank.

Even Ray Burke, one of the very few people who did suffer from his exposure as a corrupt fixer, receives a State pension of well over €100,000 a year.

Michael Lowry has become a local hero. His ambitions to be taoiseach were derailed by the scandal, but his vote has substantially increased since he was first exposed. In 1992, when he was apparently untainted, he got 7,400 votes in North Tipperary. Last month he got 14,100 votes – almost twice as many.

In all, almost 20 years of investigations have resulted in a grand total of 112 weeks behind bars: 56 for the lobbyist Frank Dunlop, six for Liam Lawlor, 14 for Ray Burke and 36 for the former assistant Dublin city manager George Redmond, whose conviction was subsequently quashed. Two years' jail for two decades of scams – for anyone thinking of enriching themselves corruptly, not bad odds.

This is why the most significant revelation this week was not the appalling behaviour revealed by Moriarty but the collective swagger and absolute confidence of Denis O'Brien, Michael Lowry and Ben Dunne. They clearly feel untouchable, shielded in O'Brien's case by vast wealth, in Lowry's by his massive vote, in Dunne's by his absolute conviction that the millions he funnelled towards politicians were just part of the way Ireland is.

The Big Fella ended his performance on Liveline by boasting that he was able to get a brain scan for a friend: "There was a long, long waiting list, but I was able to ring somebody who rang somebody."

Circumventing waiting lists or ringing ministers: it's all part of doing business. "In the business world, there is an old saying: it's not what you know but who you know." He was trying to think of the word for it and came up with "internetting". Perhaps, Joe Duffy suggested, the word he was looking for was "networking". And the Big Fella happily agreed.

After all the money and all the lies, all the lapses of memory and sickening revelations, we at least have a word for it. Networking.

[seafoid]

I like this one. Business as usual is banjaxed.

http://mobile.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/01/18/keillor_lie/index.html

But who tells the truth to the man who is driving straight into the setting sun and thinks he's heading due east? His wife murmurs that, uh, maybe we should look at a map, and he accuses her of being a defeatist who tries to tear him down any way she can in order to conceal her own lack of ideas. The man is heading the wrong way and speeding and the idiot light is flashing — low oil pressure — and the idiot is trying to be manly and authoritative but everyone can see he's faking it, hoping for G-d to rearrange the landscape for his convenience. Someone ought to speak up, and yet he is fascinating. As the administration is these days, so resonant and believable. The Arctic icecap melts and the Chinese finance our tax cuts and someday we will have spent six years and trillions of dollars to bring democracy to Iraq, whatever that may mean, and the SUV of state turns toward the setting sun, driven by cocker spaniels. And there is so much intensity there, and they are so much in the moment.

[Bogball XV]

Have any of you had a look at O'Brien's wikipedia page lately? Could have been written by the fella himself, the only thing missing is the nine-inch-dick claim.

What I find the most interesting about wikipedia pages isn't so much the articles themselves but the discussion pages behind them and the editing history. You can see some real pitch battles being fought over what should be included and not included. On O'Brien's article it's basically a big w**k-fest over the man himself, but then somebody's dumped the Moriarty stuff in there, and then the "citation police" have come in littering it with "citation needed" tags every time something negative about him appears.  That sort of thing can be counter-productive though because editors on the other side will just go off and get citations and add them in, making the article even stronger.

someone probably has been appointed to a full time role with the specific responsibility of looking after DO'Bs wiki page.

It's obvious that he really hankers after the respect of his D4 peers, why else would he care?  He took the tax free €300m he made from Digifone and it's from there that his real success story starts, he has done brilliantly, he's turned that €300m into €2.5Bn.

If only the Criminal Assets Bureau could get their hands on a slice of that action.

Was speaking to someone in the know yesterday. It seems CAB have already been investigating behind the scenes for the past 12-18 months. Fingers crossed.

Should they not have started about 12 years ago?  In any case it's unlikely they'll raise a penny from this, as they will be unable to prove corruption to the standard the law requires.  The only people who have any hope of 'punishing' Lowry, Dunne etc are the revenue (who have probably exhausted their chances with both Dunne and Lowry - as they've settled cases with them) and Moriarty who can hit them with costs, but more likely withhold costs.

[Declan]

O'Tooles analysis is pretty much in line with my own. Also Gene Kerrigan's article below is "on the money" to coin apohrase

Sunday March 27 2011

THIS final volume of the Moriarty Report is immense and remarkably detailed. There is no innuendo, there is no gossip. There are facts and where the facts are disputed other facts are brought in as corroboration. Here, we will consider just one crucial area -- the payment to Michael Lowry. Then we consider the remarkable O'Brien/Lowry response to the report.

It's a vivid picture: Denis O'Brien and his friend of 22 years, Barry Maloney, out for a 90-minute run in the winter of 1996, just months after Esat Digifone had won the lucrative mobile phone licence. They were having a minor squabble about a business issue. It was probably on this occasion that O'Brien claimed to have paid Lowry IR£100,000 (there's a difference between O'Brien and Maloney on where and when this exchange took place, but agreement that it occurred).

The two were then colleagues in Esat. The minor squabble was about Maloney's reluctance to pay three people money owed for consultancy. Maloney needed paperwork, O'Brien was embarrassed to meet these people when they hadn't been paid.

To encourage his friend to pay up what was a minor debt, O'Brien said words to the effect that: "I've had to make two payments of a hundred thousand each."

O'Brien either stated, or it was understood in the context, that one of these people was Lowry.

There is no conflict about this.

O'Brien's explanation is that he was trying to jolt Maloney into action, so he made up the IR£200,000 incident. He later claimed that he knew that Lowry's business was in trouble and he'd decided to give him IR£100,000 -- and earmarked the money at Woodchester Bank -- then decided not to. And when trying to get Maloney to act on the minor debts, he doubled the figure to IR£200,000 "for effect".

Nothing was said about this for months. Then O'Brien said to Maloney: "Do you remember I told you about the payment to Lowry? Well, I just want to let you know I didn't do it. Thank God,I didn't do it."

Maloney was worried. The company was about to be floated on the market and he was afraid this odd business with Lowry might come back at them. He remembers O'Brien saying, as they left the office and walked down the stairs: "You're not buying it, are you? You don't believe me?" And then: "Well, what I didn't tell you was that I was going to make the payment, but it got stuck with an intermediary. I thought about it but I didn't do it."

As O'Brien determined to continue the flotation, Maloney's stress increased. If there was an "intermediary" involved, an outsider, this could all erupt and damage the company. The two friends fell out. The disagreement led to the first investigation into whether O'Brien had paid Lowry. This internal Esat investigation took place before the Moriarty Tribunal began its inquiries.

A senior lawyer, Owen O'Connell, partner in William Fry, asked the questions. He flew to Boston for a six-hour session with O'Brien. He decided that relevant bank accounts should be scoured and any payment above IR£25,000 should be examined. O'Brien said he paid Lowry nothing. His earlier claim to have done so, he said, was a "wind-up".

From page 90 of the Moriarty Report: Mr O'Brien's accountant, Aidan Phelan, "did not on that occasion disclose to Mr O'Connell that. . . some six weeks after the GSM licence had been issued to Esat Digifone, Mr Phelan, on Mr O'Brien's instructions, had withdrawn 407,000 pounds from an (O'Brien) account. . . at Woodchester Bank" and opened a "special purpose account" offshore, at AIB in the Isle of Man. O'Brien also failed to mention this account to O'Connell.

O'Connell finished his inquiry without knowledge of a significant bank account. The floatation went ahead. On Prime Time last week, O'Brien supporter Sarah Carey conceded, "As bad as the money trail looks. . ." And it really doesn't look good.

Phelan, on O'Brien's instructions, set up the AIB (IoM) offshore account in his own name, not O'Brien's. He gave an address at Cape Cod, Hyannis, USA -- this was the address he and a partner used for a sporting-goods business. In July 1996, Phelan transferred £150,000 from this account to an offshore account in the Channel Islands, owned by a Fine Gael fixer named David Austin.

Meanwhile, Lowry had hired an accountant, Denis O'Connor, to represent him at the McCracken Tribunal. He told O'Connor to give the tribunal a complete account of his (Lowry's) financial affairs. He didn't tell O'Connor he'd set up an offshore account on the Isle of Man. Nor that he had given O'Connor's accountancy office address as the address of the account -- with an instruction that no correspondence was to be sent to this address. Lowry, then a government minister, gave his occupation as "company director".

He set up this account specifically to receive a payment from Austin, the Fine Gael fixer. In October 1996, Austin transferred IR£147,000 to Lowry's new offshore account -- from the IR£150,000 of Denis O'Brien's money that had been sent to Austin's offshore account.

Just over three months later, Lowry transferred the money back to Austin's same offshore account -- on February 7, 1997. That was the date the McCracken Tribunal was established.

For Judge Michael Moriarty, the expression "stuck with an intermediary" took on a possible new meaning. He concluded that Austin, who has since died, was the intermediary.

O'Brien had an explanation for the £150,000 sent to Austin's account. He was buying a holiday home in Spain. And Lowry's explanation for receiving a similar sum from Austin was that he was getting a loan to do up a new house in Dublin. O'Brien did buy that holiday home, although Moriarty concludes that the £150,000 was not the house payment. Lowry's claimed loan has little paperwork to back it up.

The fact that knowledge of two offshore bank accounts, O'Brien's and Lowry's, was withheld from the Esat inquiry solicitor and from Lowry's accountant impressed Moriarty.

He painstakingly assembled the facts, the discrepancies in paperwork and concluded that this was the crucial money trail. There are other money transactions, which we have no space to recount here.

How does Moriarty see Lowry helping O'Brien get the licence?

He "displayed an appreciable interest in the substantive process, had irregular interactions with interested parties at its most sensitive stages, sought and received substantive information on emerging trends, made his preferences as between the leading candidates known, conveyed his views on how the financial weakness of Esat Digifone should be countered, ultimately brought a guillotine down on the work of the Project Group, proceeded to bypass consideration by his Cabinet colleagues and thereby not only influenced but delivered the result". Moriarty provides a detailed narrative of this, based on evidence.

It's a constant cry that Moriarty has rejected the evidence of 17 civil servants and somehow branded them liars. This is not true. There is some criticism of civil servants -- for instance, "in their concern for the administrative efficiency of the project, (they) unwittingly lost sight of its adjudicative character". The criticism is specific, the evidence of the civil servants is central to Moriarty's narrative of how Lowry interfered in the process.

The O'Brien/Lowry response to the report is quite shocking. O'Brien said Moriarty "ignored all the evidence and the paperwork", a transparently untrue remark. His efforts to legally handcuff Moriarty were rejected by the courts, O'Brien says, because "the judiciary have put a ring of steel around him, because he was never up to the job of actually writing this report -- and consequently they said, 'God, we'd better protect this man.'"

This is beyond silly. It's effectively an unfounded charge of criminal conspiracy against members of the Supreme Court. Finger-pointing and name-calling are not adequate responses. The notion of Moriarty as some kind of bogeyman or fool, backed up by a conspiracy of High and Supreme Court judges, is beyond absurd. Moriarty has a solid record of ability and an earned reputation for fairness.

O'Brien and Lowry had months to prepare a solid evidence-based response. O'Brien has very deep pockets and the support of excellent lawyers. Complaining about the cost of tribunals or the length or the procedures has validity -- but it's beside the point. The nature of the response doesn't detract from Moriarty's credibility, it adds to it.

Could there be an alternative narrative constructed from the evidence assembled by Moriarty? Yes, of course. But you'd have to accept coincidence piled on coincidence, disregard a lot of awkward facts and ignore an astounding collection of evidence that establishes a pattern wholly in line with Moriarty's conclusions.

I found the report thoroughly convincing.