Mr. Colm Kincaid:

I understand the issue the Chair is grappling with. To take a step back for a moment, I will quickly describe the gateways through which some of these entities come to be regulated by us. As Mr. Madouros mentioned, under European and domestic law, in certain cases where an entity is set up and starts marketing investment in itself to the public, or to portions of the public, it becomes a requirement to have that fund authorised by a national competent authority. If such an entity is set up in Ireland, that would be us. As people know, we have a large funds industry here.

Our focus as a regulator in regulating such an entity is to ensure it is acting in accordance with the best interests of the investors in the fund. There will be an investment mandate, which could be to invest in government bonds, fisheries, forestry or whatever. One basis on which we would intervene is if we saw a fund investing outside its mandate. We do that for the protection of those investors. Alongside that, on a sort of macro level, we have a concern regarding those entities investing in this economy, be they located here or elsewhere, to determine what the implications are of this investment and how resilient the economy is to it. We do not, per se, regulate the simple fact of a person purchasing an asset in Ireland.