Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 12 July 2018

Public Accounts Committee

2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 23: Accounts of the National Treasury Management Agency
National Treasury Management Agency: Financial Statements 2017

9:00 am

Mr. Conor O'Kelly:

Things happen, first of all, so none of us can predict the future and what is going to happen. Companies go out of business and they succeed and they fail and that happens in the construction business which is a particularly volatile business. It does not matter how one is building; nobody can predict the future and nobody has a crystal ball. The question is whether one has a mechanism set up which, in the event of something like that happening, allows one to get around it and have enough flexibility. When the contract was originally put out Carillion was a very robust publicly quoted company which had the confidence of shareholders and investors all over the world. In our counterparty analysis, it looked like a fine company at that point. By the way, it was a fine company at that point. In designing the contract with what is a good counterparty at that point, we build into the mechanism that, in the event of one of the parties failing, which happened in the case of Carillion, the other members of PPPCo can take over the running of the PPPCo and then start to instruct and make sure the schools get built. What we are concerned about is the schools being built.

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