Marc MacSharry (Sligo-Leitrim, Fianna Fail)
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It is. It goes back to when the committee took a position on the establishment of a committee of inspection for the liquidation. To date that has been, effectively, ignored by the Department of Finance. I accept that people may not have had time to read it yet, and while it was commissioned by a third party, Professor Gurdgiev's report very much supports that proposal. The report indicates that without such a committee of inspection, it is not possible for us to really be sure of value for money in that process. The periodic report is as per other periodic reports. One is heading for €306 million in expenditure in this regard. The level of transparency around the liquidation would not be remotely like that for a standard liquidation. There is an awful lot of stuff that is not there at all. Professor Gurdgiev's report makes recommendations and suggestions on how we might go about that, which is very much in keeping with our own position on this over the past couple of years.

We could usefully do the State some service by inviting Professor Constantin Gurdgiev to come in here and tease out some of his proposals and hope that the Department of Finance, which has not acted heretofore to establish a committee of inspection to give the appropriate oversight to this liquidation, may yet do so.

There is an ongoing case where the applicant is just seeking the same thing we are and the State is defending the case. I am sure we will raise the issue with departmental officials when they come in. We came across correspondence, which I shared, where the Office of the Chief State Solicitor offered the Committee of Public Accounts an olive branch, apart from that. One of my questions when the officials come in is: how much money has been spent so far on defending the case? Why can heads not be cracked together, make the appropriate improvements, get rid of this unnecessary case that is before the courts and give the public the level of oversight that they require? This is the most expensive liquidation in the history of the State and is probably comparable with the largest in Europe, and oversight is non-existent.