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:
Absolutely. We have set it out on page 8 of our report, where we talk about the corporates. The disk we received from the French tax administration was complicated. It was an extract of records held by HSBC which fell into the hands of the French tax administration in a convoluted way. When the French sent us the disk, they sent us a kind of index on how we could interpret the data. It included two amounts from November 2005 and 2006, and a maximum value in the period of the 18 months or so. There was $6.2 billion linked to the corporates, and of that, $2.6 billion was linked to funds administered from Ireland and $3.7 billion was linked to administrators based in Ireland, accountants or solicitors, to do with the funds industry. In excess of 98% and closer to 99% of the total money that was on the disk was related to the global funds industry and had practically no relationship to Ireland or Irish taxpayers.