Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 3 July 2018
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach
Role and Operation of National Development Finance Agency: Discussion
1:30 pm
Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity)
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Is the NDFA's view that even if it had done further digging, it could not have discovered that this would be a serious problem in the future? The information could not have been found. Several articles on this topic were published in the Financial Times, The Guardian, and other newspapers. The Financial Times, for example, reported that with "hindsight, the board fell into a series of textbook traps". The same article goes on to list these traps, including failing "to halt acquisitions", "aggressive accounting policies" and "continuing to pay out dividends even as cash haemorrhaged out of Carillion". None of those things could have been spotted by, say, mid-2016.