Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 15 September 2022

Public Accounts Committee

Business of Committee

9:30 am

Photo of Brian StanleyBrian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein)
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The Deputy knows the situation with the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. We invited officials and want them to come before us in October. That is it. The Secretary General has mentioned unavailability. However, the secretariat will revert back to them and we will confirm that we are actually requesting their attendance here and there is a requirement on the Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to attend.

That concludes our consideration of the work programme. There is another matter of business. I raise the issue of the Siteserv investigation inquiry. Obviously, the inquiry has happened and has been a six-year project. It has cost in the region of €30 million. I only caught the headline figures on this, but the main finding was that the maximum potential loss to the taxpayer from the sale of Siteserv by the Irish Bank Resolution’s Corporation, IBRC, would have been in the region of €8 million to €30 million. It took six years to find that out.

The Moriarty tribunal, as I recall, was in the region of – I have a note here – €66 million at the end of 2021. That does not count third-party costs, which normally match that or will be well in excess of it. The figure will probably be in the region of €150 million by the end of it.

I refer again to the €30 million for the Siteserv inquiry. Members will recall it had a value of €140 million and IBRC sold it to Denis O’Brien for €41 million, if I recall. It was in the newspapers last week. There was then a six-year inquiry into that sale that cost €30 million.