Mr. Peter Smyth:

I am satisfied that the process is safe. I have followed a number of different lines. I looked at all of the meetings involving the former Minister and different parties to the tender process and gone through them in some detail, considering available minutes or any testimony to which I had access. I had access to the testimony of different people as to what was discussed at those meetings. I confirm that for 37 of those meetings where there is third-party verification present, the national broadband plan was not discussed. I am reliant on the former Minister and Mr. McCourt for the view that there was no discussion of the national broadband plan at the other three meetings. While I have no reason to believe that the national broadband plan was discussed based on what was presented, I proceeded to look at what has been the impact on the process itself. In that case, I have much more robust evidence to support the view that nothing has happened with the process. I have looked at four different things in that regard. The first thing I looked at was information available to the Minister which could have been passed on to a bidder which would have been of benefit to the bidder. Purely in view of the nature of the competitive dialogue process where there is ongoing dialogue between the Department and the bidder, information is communicated in real time between the parties in terms of positions on closing contracts, the submission on technical capacity, financing, operation and running and what is being proposed. There is no basis to assume the Minister has information that the bidder does not already have through the process. The one thing the bidder does not seem to be taking account of is the Department's affordability envelope. The Minister is privy to that and it is evident from the discussion on 26 June that the bidder was being pressed to bring the cost down. In my experience, if someone has evidence or a view of what the affordability is, tenders tend to come in very close to that number. For me, that is the evidence that the information was not communicated.

I have gone further and looked at how the documents evolved and who was involved in making changes to them and whether the Minister had any involvement in that. All of that is happening at the bottom level of the teams. When I look at the evaluation process, the evaluation teams are acting completely independently. Even when one comes up to the next level of management, those managers cannot change the outcome of the evaluation. They can comment on the way things are phrased and presented but they cannot actually go back to evaluation teams and require them to change a finding with which management does not agree. That is totally within the gift of the evaluation team. Having followed those chains of evidence through the process, I am satisfied that the process is safe.