Ms Josephine Feehily:

I am sorry if I created confusion by introducing the spin-off investigations. The graph is correct regarding what we call the Ansbacher project. Some six cases remain, four of which are at appeal. I was trying to show that because of the extent of our powers, which are much broader than those of the authorised officer or the High Court company law inspectors, which they acknowledge, as we went through the reiterative High Court orders and found new evidence of practices, we followed them. I was trying to show the persistence and resilience we brought to the entire special investigations era, which has yielded over €2 billion. For example, one of the High Court orders which we got against an offshore financial entity gave us evidence of a footprint in a clearing bank in Ireland. Thus we had somewhere else to go, and we got new High Court orders against the clearing bank regarding the offshore entity, and this spun off a separate special investigation, which we call the clearing accounts investigation, and it brought in €25 million.

As I indicated in my opening remarks, approximately 700 trusts, special purpose vehicles and entities were associated with these cases. It was not easy to break down the trusts. As we did so, we learned about how they were structured and how the settlers operated. In the Finance Act 2008, we secured a new power automatically requiring entities in this jurisdiction - individuals, financial institutions, lawyers, etc. - establishing an offshore trust to report the establishment to us. The power had a backward effect. They had to report everything they had established since 2003. That spun us off into another one, which is ongoing. The information began to come in to us in 2009 and has been coming in since. It has secured €65 million, and the figure is rising because it is ongoing. I am sorry if I confused the two projects. I was trying to show how persistent we are when we get a source of information and funds.