DO'B and the Tribunal

This post has been in draft form for some time but only getting round to posting it now.

Four weeks ago Denis O'Brien, the media and mobile phone tycoon, held a series of interviews with Sunday newspapers. It was a weird situation knowing this fella was talking to three other papers all coming out on same day. My brief was to make sure I got the best line (news angle) from him. "Don't get scooped," basically.

After a bit of probing early in the interview he told me the 1996 license award had been found to be "illegal" and there were 60 findings against him personally. That stood out to me as the best line anyway. Mark Coughlan had a good look at what the other papers reported.

The tribunal had asked that no one report on its provisional findings "while they remained private" but that moratorium effectively ended when the Mail on Sunday and the Village put some of the key findings out there. Then O'Brien decided to get out some of his own bad press. O'Brien is obviously trying to get his retaliation in first but it's unlikely to change Moriarty's mind. He has something else planned too. You wonder what that could be.

We were going to put the transcript of the whole interview online but by the time the lawyers finished with it there wouldn't have been much left.

The tribunal has not looked kindly on these interviews or our report. It seems to think O'Brien has acted illegally in giving the interviews. More on this to come I'm sure.