Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

Section 62 is about applications for designation as a participating institution and section 63 is about the effect of application for designation. These are two very powerful sections because they give the banks, the credit institutions in the one year guarantee scheme, and Irish-owned subsidiaries of foreign banks the right to apply. Section 63 states: "By making an application under this Chapter the applicant credit institution and all of its subsidiaries shall be taken to undertake to comply with the provisions of this Act (including this Act as amended from time to time)" subject to any prohibition in any applicable law.

The Minister said throughout the summer that the Attorney General, his officials, etc., worked very hard on NAMA, and I accept that they did. However, he did not see fit to bring this particular restriction on the requirements for information before this House. He put them in at the last minute in order to make it easier for institutions to withhold information because some of their structures may be held overseas in jurisdictions such as Switzerland, Bermuda and the Isle of Man as well as the other places to which the Minister referred. He has still not explained why this has gone into the legislation.

It appears to bring into the legislation the power of an institution to state that banks in some offshore location are not entitled to communicate, because that is the mark of an offshore banking location. Very often they are not entitled to communicate with authorities in other jurisdictions. That is what makes those banks so powerful and so secretive and that is part of the reason the financial system failed. The Minister has still not given an explanation as to why he brought this in at this point given that he has had all these lawyers crawling all over it.

The Minister has still not commented on whether it is true that there have been significant movements of assets to spouses and family members and to offshore locations out of the powers of this jurisdiction. There is no point in the Minister telling me to go the Garda; he is the Minister. Unless he can respond to the contrary, what he is doing is enabling more of that to happen.

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