Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 12 December 2017
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Agriculture, Food and the Marine
Coillte's Annual Report for 2016 and Climate Change: Discussion
4:00 pm
Mr. Fergal Leamy:
Depending on planning and other issues, we are probably looking from two years just to put the infrastructure in place.
We sold the telecoms business for €70 million. One of the issues we faced as a group when I came in three years ago was that we had several businesses which were non-core. Telecoms is a business which is a good example of where we can add value. It was sold for €70 million, €20 million more than we expected to get for it. We then reinvested that money in our core business and used it to pay down the debt of the business.
We need to make sure we manage our business in a sustainable way. We have a significant group of pensioners, we are landowners and we rely on timber prices, so we need to make sure we have lower debt levels. That is what we did with the money.