Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 10 February 2022

Public Accounts Committee

2020 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 29 - Environment, Climate and Communications
National Broadband Plan Expenditure and Related Matters

9:30 am

Mr. Fergal Mulligan:

It is a huge contract, coming in at nearly 3,000 pages, with 700 or 800 obligations on NBI and a number of obligations on the Minister, one of which relates to paying the subsidies. As is the case with all contracts, there are a number of areas where there might be disputes or potential disputes where we try to avoid disputes. Both parties get their legal advice on that so we defer to William Fry the odd time for advice where somebody might have a certain interpretation of a clause in a contract. There may be complaints by other operators in the industry about what NBI is doing and they might come to us looking for information around the contract. Judicial review proceedings from another operator are ongoing and this is something where we get legal advice. We get state aid advice generally and commercial law advice where, again, there might be issues around a subsidy payment such as whether it should be this or that. We get legal advice on those sort of things.

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