Mr. Niall Cody:

There is no doubt some of them could have been. However, all of them had been dissolved before 2005 and a lot of them had been dissolved in the 1990s. We profiled them all and we looked for links to Irish individuals - directors. The reality is that most of them were Irish-registered and non-resident. We are familiar with what was in place up until the 1990s. There was a facility where one could be Irish-registered and non-resident with no link to the country.

I actually discussed this with the principal officer who leads the offshore assets group. He looked for a link to Ireland in these dissolved companies. When he could not find them, he would have had to go to the High Court to get the company reinstated, but he would not have anybody to deal with. As he said to me, he could have written to somebody in Kazakhstan to see if he could get it, but it would have been a complete waste of our scarce resources in tackling this.

The amount of money in relation to that was actually quite small. However, to the extent that there are nuggets or gems that are linked to tax evasion in those corporate areas, since 2010 when we got this disk, we have some new technology which my predecessor talked about - technology that we have to link entities. I have asked the investigation and prosecution team to put all these corporates back into our social network analysis tool and to see if we can get linkages because if there are linkages to tax evasion that we can trace here, the normal four-year limit does not apply and we will still look at.