Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Senate clearly revealed that two or three companies were incorporated in Ireland which were stateless. We changed the law as soon as we knew about it, and rightly so. My suspicion is that the Revenue Commissioners knew about it a long time before that but did nothing about it. They did not tell us but turned a blind eye. We do not have access to the information as to where are the economic rights of Apple's intellectual property.

We do not have access to their accounts. Revenue had all of that. In my view, Revenue may have known this as early as 1990 and yet as Mr. Cody rightly said, a paper was done by the Department of Finance in conjunction with Revenue, in 1997, to close down this tax loophole, which actually happened in 1999. It again turned a blind eye to what Apple was doing in Cork. Can Mr. Cody confirm to the committee that he was aware that Apple was operating stateless companies incorporated in this jurisdiction prior to the US Senate hearings?