Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I understand from a political point of view including the figure of €50 million because if one sets expectations low and several hundred million comes in, that is great. However, even the €50 million figure shocked me as a placeholder or a lowball figure. The vulture funds control assets for which they paid about €40 billion. We have the detail on that. For example, NAMA by the end of this year will have sold about €30 billion. If IBRC, Deutsche Bank, RBS, HBOS, etc., are added on top of that, €40 billion is a conservative figure. Let us call the assets of the companies about which we are talking at €40 billion. We know from their own accounts, not just one, but multiple filed accounts, that the yield they are getting on the interest payments alone per year is 9%. That gives a yield from €40 billion of €3.6 billion. There are legitimate operating costs, but this figure is net of their bank loans. Let us take off €100 million for operating costs. That brings us down to an annual profit on interest payments alone of about €3.5 billion.

That is before we get into capital gains. Capital gains doubles it, but let us assume they do not do anything to realise the capital gains. If we just stick with the interest payments that we know they are getting from their 2014 accounts, we are looking at annual profits on interest payments from Irish businesses and Irish families of about €3.5 billion. A total of €50 million over a profit base of €3.5 billion is about 1.5%. I would assert that if we manage to get an effective tax rate of 1.4% or 1.5%, before capital gains tax, we will have failed completely in what we are trying to do. Other Irish businesses pay 12.5% corporation tax and then they pay 20% withholding tax. In the context of Deputy Paul Murphy's question and the numbers we are talking about, it is really important that we remember that this is not some marginal activity being done by some specialist funds out of New York, this is at a huge scale for the size of the country. Let us say we all meet up again next year or in two years' time – we know who the firms are - and we look at the total amount of tax that is paid, what effective percentage when we take in capital gains withholding tax would the Government say is a reasonable amount for them to have paid? If it is more than that, that is great and if it is less than that perhaps some of the loopholes I am pointing out are being used. What sort of effective rate would be a reasonable rate?