Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I support the amendment. Maybe six months is not possible if the information is not available. Maybe nine or 12 months is better. Wiring something into the legislation would be very useful. Say we receive the legislation in 15 months. It is possible that none of us will be in the Oireachtas in 15 months' time. Obviously, the Minister of State will be. Who knows what is going to happen? The transparency is clear. I only found out about this because I was looking at the 2014 accounts of Mars Capital. I was not looking for tax avoidance but to see what discount it had received on Irish Nationwide Building Society's mortgages, which was, from memory, approximately 72%. At the time, I had argued strongly with the Minister, Deputy Michael Noonan, that the State should not sell Irish citizens' mortgages at huge discounts to foreign debt collectors which could then evict those families from their homes. At a discount of 72%, Mars Capital paid 28 cent in the euro. Then, I found out it was not paying any tax. From memory, it was paying a few euro in tax.

The only reason I got into this was that while the section 110 companies have to file accounts publicly with the Companies Registration Office, ICAVs, QIFs, QIAIFs, and all manner of IREFs do not. I hope the Minister of State is correct about section 21, which is shutting down the vulture fund tax avoidance, and I thank his officials for all the work they have done. If we succeed in shutting it down, there will be a movement from section 110 to other tax avoidance vehicles. The problem is that the other tax avoidance vehicles do not file publicly accessible accounts, so we will not know what is going on. The media did a great job on this and legislators brought much of it to public attention, based on our ability to examine the companies' accounts. Wiring into the amendment what Deputy Pearse Doherty is seeking, maybe with a slightly longer time period to ensure we have the right information, would be very useful in that it would ensure the information comes back up. Much of the capital is about to move from the reasonably transparent world of section 110 to the completely secret world of ICAVs, QIFs and QIAIFs. We will not know what happens, given that they will not stay as section 110 companies if the Minister of State is successful.

I wanted to propose an amendment, although it does not belong in a Finance Bill. I want to ensure we change the law so the QIFs, QIAIFs, super-QIFs, super-orphan-QIFs, super-orphan-QIAIFs, ICAVs, IREFs or whatever they are, have to file publicly accessible accounts just like the section 110 companies do.