Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 4 December 2014

Public Accounts Committee

Investigations by Revenue into Authorised Officers Report

12:50 pm

Ms Josephine Feehily:

To be clear, when I say "related", I was simply including that detail to show the complexity of the project. If we refer to 289 cases, a person might wonder what we have been doing for the last umpteen years. When I say "connected", there are situations which were explained and set out to some degree in the High Court inspectors' report. Typically, a case would have a person, perhaps a family member, a discretionary trust or a special purpose vehicle and maybe another trust. That is what I mean when I refer to "related" entities. The first thing we had to do was connect them all and they became one case. I assure the Deputy that the entire 700 entities have been connected to the 289 cases. They have been investigated, examined and followed through on. If my language was not precise enough, I apologise for that. There is no loose thread in relation to the entities that were connected to these cases, every single one of them. In fact, breaking some of those, to get behind trusts, would have been one of the reasons we had to go to the High Court.