Chocolate expenses

It's not quite a duck island but a lawyer working at the Moriarty Tribunal has claimed for a couple of Belgian Chocolates on her state expense account.

Most of the tribunal's expense claims, released through Freedom of Information, were fairly run of the mill but there was another lawyer who claimed for a Toblerone bar. Strangely the Belgian Chocolates were approved but the Toblerone wasn't. A bit of chocolate inequality there.

98FM's Toll Trolls did a funny piece on this story on Tuesday. I'd imagine Denis O'Brien, the station's owner, had a good chuckle over that.

So much so that he has decided to take out a series of newspaper adverts to highlight this story and the high cost of the Moriarty Tribunal.

Two Moriarty tribunal lawyers have already shown to benefit from a typo which has given them €1m extra in salary payments than other tribunal lawyers since 2002.

There are basically two types of tribunal stories. One shows the ridiculous costs of the tribunals to the state. The other variety is on the long awaited findings.

We know already that Moriarty has found against O'Brien, Lowry and the civil servants in his premliminary findings but the whole thing is dragging on, at a cost of over €300,000 per month, as people try and get the judge to change his mind.

Accross Dublin Castle, Judge Alan Mahon, in the planning tribunal, did not make the same committment as Judge Moriarty to give those he made findings against a chance to make submissions on premliminary findings.

Owen O'Callaghan, the developer, is challenging that in the High Court but if he is unsuccssful it looks like Mahon will beat Moriarty to the punch and have his report out by Christmas.