Mr. John Hogan:

I believe that the company the Chairman is speaking about is Apple and the state aid decision the Commission issued in August 2016. The alleged state aid calculated by the Commission at the time was in the region of €13 billion. The Chairman asked where we are in that regard. The Chairman is right that we will not discuss the appeal, which is before the European Court of Justice as, obviously, there are limitations on what we could say on the appeal. Notwithstanding the appeal, and the difference in view between the Ireland and the Commission on the case, Ireland is committed to respecting the decision of the Commission in this regard.

The Chairman has touched on some of the challenges we have in respect of this case. It is an unprecedented amount for state aid recovery. It requires a bespoke solution. It is complex in terms of the nature of the volume of the alleged aid involved and it is set against the particular backdrop of a negative interest rate environment. We looked at the options around what could be done on this. In many cases the idea of an escrow account is a solution but an escrow account in this case would have been a sub-optimal solution because we have a large amount of money that has to be managed in a particular way, as the Chairman have noted. Given that it is likely to be the subject of management for several years until the final conclusion is reached in the case, we have been careful in terms of how we have put in place infrastructure to manage it. We have been involved with the Commission on a consistent basis explaining what has been going on in the background and the extensive work done by the Department in partnership with the Office of the Attorney General and the National Treasury Management Agency, NTMA, as well as our engagements with the company.

Given the nature of the funds involved we need to look at the matter in context. A sum of €13 billion is twice the size of our existing Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, ISIF, fund. It is half the size of the National Pensions Reserve Fund, NPRF, at its height. The moneys at issue are market moving moneys. Therefore, whatever solution we put in place has to be cognisant of that scenario.

We have made a great deal of progress in recent months in reaching agreement with the company involved in terms of the nature of the fund we put in place. The Chairman is right to say it has taken far longer than we thought or anticipated that it could have taken. At one stage we were signalling to the Commission that, given the size and scale of what we have, it would be nine to ten months from earlier in this year before we would have a solution in place. It has taken a little longer than that. We are at the stage now where we expect that, in the next short while, the arrangements will be endorsed by ourselves and the company involved. That is our anticipation, against the background of what has been a good deal of work.

In tandem - the Chairman alluded to this – we issued a RFT for investment managers in the summer of this year to find custodians-----