DENIS O'Brien's expanding media interests may create competition headaches for his Boxer DTT consortium, which won the right to launch commercial digital terrestrial television (DTT) last week, according to legal sources.

Due to the structure of O'Brien's deal with Boxer, the consortium will require approval from Tanaiste Mary Coughlan, in her role as Minister for Enterprise, under media merger rules.

Although this is usually a formality, a leading competition law expert told the Sunday Tribune that O'Brien's increasing Irish media interests would "give the Minister something to think about".

The expert, who asked not to be identified, said the Tanaiste would have to weigh up O'Brien's other media interests, which include the state's two national commercial radio stations, Today FM and Newstalk, and a 25% stake in its largest newspaper group, Independent News & Media (IN&M), which holds a 29.9% stake in the Sunday Tribune.

"This would give O'Brien [ownership of] newspapers, radio and television, which could be quite a powerful tool for Communicorp to have. A lot is going to depend on how Boxer structures its operations," he said.

Communicorp is O'Brien's media holding company and owns 50% of Boxer DTT.

The consortium's chairwoman Lucy Gaffney said that it didn't envisage any difficulty in securing approval.

"We are a media operator, who owns a platform and will not create content. The content will not be our own, we will buy it from others," she said.

Boxer DTT's licencing submission argues that because it "will be buying content from much larger third parties, it will not be a position to skew or influence the type of programming material on offer to it."

Meanwhile, it has emerged that the Swedish operations of one of O'Brien's partners in the project, Boxer TV Access, was at the centre of a long-running European competition dispute, which was only resolved lastmonth.

The European Commission had threatened to take legal action against Sweden due to Boxer's monopoly on DTT services there, which forced broadcasters to use its encryption and access systems. The case was dropped after a change to Swedish broadcasting law.

According to Boxer's chief operating officer Per Wicklund, however, the action arose due to problems with the system under which the company won its original DTT licence. He said there was no issue with its business model.