Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 12 March 2015

Public Accounts Committee

Revenue Commissioners Investigation of HSBC Offshore Accounts

10:00 am

Mr. Niall Cody:

That is why the law was changed. It was to ensure that the Irish flag could not be linked to a corporate entity that had no physical presence here. One of the things to mention about the corporates is that 270 are linked to this disk, 185 of which had no entries on either of the three dates that we are talking about. They had no balance in December 2005, no balance in December 2006 and no maximum value over that whole period of 2005 to 2006. They were dormant accounts. The disk was in essence an extract of the bank's customer service record and as such was a whole pile of data. If the bank had an entity at some stage, the record was still there. It was not as if the dormant ones were cancelled off the customer record. Some of the cases were dissolved 20 years before the disk came into our possession.