Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)
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Since group financial statements relate to a corporate group, the group financial statements of a subsidiary, which is also a parent company, would not give any more information than the group accounts of the company at the top of the corporate group. Therefore deletion of this exemption would benefit no one other than the lawyers and accountants who would have to prepare and file thousands more group financial statements than they do at present.

Many foreign direct investment companies rely on this exemption to avoid having to prepare intermediate level group accounts that simply replicate a part of their general top level group accounts. The economic benefit of investing in Ireland would be substantially eroded by requiring these companies to prepare many different sets of group accounts. This would also be a departure from established international practice. Most notably this exemption exists in the United Kingdom. This deletion might constitute a breach of articles 7, 8 and 11 of the seventh accounting directive. For those reasons I am not in favour of changing the section.