Former chief executive of media group described outcome of lengthy inquiry that yielded a 868-page report at a cost of almost €6 million as ‘weird’
“In many respects the purpose and extent of the data interrogation was and remains unknown to the company, and the company awaits the Inspectors’ findings in that regard.”Like many who have been waiting for the extraordinary events inside the group to be explained, the authors of the INM submission may be disappointed by the 868-page report the two inspectors, Irish senior counsel Sean Gillane and British solicitor Robert Fleck, have produced at a cost of €5.
O’Brien appointed Buckley to the board of INM in 2012 after O’Brien had replaced the late Tony O’Reilly as the media company’s dominant shareholder. O’Brien viewed the Independent’s coverage of him under O’Reilly as having been unfairly negative, and some of the people who had been involved in that coverage were still working at INM. Buckley, the report makes clear, harboured suspicions about some people still working in the company.
According to Buckley, in late 2014, as part of a cost-cutting exercise, he was anxious to terminate the contract INM had with its long-time legal adviser, solicitor Simon McAleese. Buckley sought emails from the INM system relating to the contract and, he said, when one email couldn’t be found, decided to engage Mizak.
“Whatever was happening at that stage, you know, was pretty serious and we weren’t going to get anything from him and that was it,” Buckley said. Mizak compiled four lists of names to be used by Trusted Data Solutions, only one of which, dated February 2015, was seen by the inspectors, the others having been destroyed. The list of 19 included the names of the tribunal barristers, journalists, public relations officials, Gavin O’Reilly and others. Public disclosure of the list in 2018 caused enormous controversy.“Horrified. Absolutely completely horrified,” said Len O’Hagan.
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