Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We are one hour and 20 minutes into this meeting and I have not been given much in the way of information. We know that Mr. Masding's bank is abandoning and breaking commitments it made to customers who are meeting their restructured payments and is offloading their loans to a vehicle which was set up in the IFSC last month and which has two directors. Those individuals are directors of approximately 300 other companies because they are an agency acting on behalf of Wilmington Trust. We do not have a clue who the owners, the people with the real power behind this, are. Permanent TSB, a State-owned bank, is abandoning its customers. In that context, the Minister for Finance should be here because he consented to this new low in Irish banking whereby the loans of people who are meeting their arrangements are allowed to be sold on to a vehicle which was established last month, which has two shelf directors and whose owner we do not know the identify of.

Pepper is just doing the administration and it is a nice wee vehicle because it has been done is such as way as to ensure that not a penny will be paid in tax. We spent weeks closing loopholes so that section 110 funds such as this would actually pay tax on interest but they have found a way around it. Is that not correct, Mr. Masding? The fact that the bank will hold 5% of the beneficial interest in this fund will now exempt it from tax on the interest. It will exempt the whole vehicle from tax.