Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail)
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Mr. Coffey had a very good handle on the figures in his opening statement. For the companies operating in Ireland who pay 80% of corporation tax, or even the ten companies paying 40% of corporation tax, has he any idea of the proportion of tangibles relative to intangibles? For companies like Google and Facebook, eBay and PayPal, much of their value is intellectual property, brands and goodwill, not the value of the offices, which are probably leased, or the value of their computers, desks or filing cabinets. Is this stripping out 80% or 90% of their balance sheets and saying we are going to allocate the sales based on the 10% that happens to be in fixed assets, given it is a fairly basic level of fixed assets?