Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister's officials for their engagement with me and the persons working in my office on both this section 21 and section 11. It has been very helpful.

Section 21 is very technical. We are expecting, as the Minister outlined, more amendments on Report Stage so we have to see how this eventually shapes up but the concern expressed by myself and others about section 110 companies seems to be addressed. It is only right to say, however, that it is baffling that we are at the point where we are closing down this loophole in terms of section 110 companies. This originated from an article by Mark Tighe in The Sunday Timesin which he identified that Denis O'Brien used an ICAV and so on and brought a good deal of public attention to this matter. We know from freedom of information requests that the Revenue has been giving guidance on whether section 110 companies would continue to be treated as section 110 companies. For example, one opinion given was that if one of the properties was in default it would fall out of a section 110 if it was repossessed. I say that because while the Government continues to claim that this was never the intended use of section 110, and I take that at face value, many people knew that that is what was going on. In fact, people were advising on it, and they had the right to advise. They were doing their job in terms of providing the advice, as Revenue is obligated to do, but that should have caused concern within the Department and Revenue. This amount of public attention did not have to be drawn on it, which in my view puts pressure on the Minster's officials in terms of trying to get this measure across the line in this Finance Bill.

In terms of the difficulties we are facing into, as Deputy Donnelly said, we are not talking about the small taxpayer with the corner shop. We are talking about multi-billion euro funds that will pick through every single word, syllable, comma and full stop in this legislation to make sure there is no way around it. That is the difficulty we are in because we still have not seen the final version of it. Having said that, it does what we intended it to do, which is to close down the use of section 110 companies in the way they were being used in terms of the profit participating note to write down their tax liabilities. That will be dealt with in section 22 but it was slotted into section 21. My amendment No. 99 is crucial in that we need to have a report-----