Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

The Minister said that the new better resourced regulatory regime in terms of the Central Bank should guard against this type of situation developing again and that there should be proper provisioning against claims by insurance companies. I am not that familiar with the insurance industry. Is it an offence for an insurance company not to make proper provision against claims or not to have or maintain sufficient assets against claims? If not, should that not be the case and should it be part of this legislation or are we simply relying on there being a little bit better regulation by the Central Bank? The Minister stated that there is now in place a little more regulation and that while it is hoped this will not happen, he cannot be sure it will not. That worries me. It is bad enough that people are being levied in this way because of what happened. Surely, in pushing through this legislation, which provides that people will pick up the tab for the malpractice of Quinn Insurance, we should be providing serious sanctions or measures to ensure this does not happen again and that where it does it will be a criminal offence.

It is right and proper that we should step in and cover policyholders who took out insurance with Quinn in good faith. We must ensure we can discharge any claims made. However, where is the logic of us covering all those losses and nursing back to health or cleaning up Quinn Insurance only to hand it over to a multinational that will obviously have an interest in it because it will be potentially profitable? If policyholders are covering the losses and paying for the clean up, why then should we not own the company at the end of this process, thus ensuring that any future profits generated from it will come back to the Exchequer or benefit policyholders in terms of lower premiums and so on? Why are we handing the cleaned up company to Liberty? I do not understand the logic behind that.

If the levy has to be imposed, can measures be taken to ensure the full extent of the cost is borne by the company's future profits rather than unloading it on to policyholders through higher premiums? Liberty Mutual would not have an interest in Quinn Insurance if it did not believe it was going to make much profit out of it in the future. Notwithstanding Mr. Quinn's malpractice, speculations and failure to manage his business in a conscientious way, underneath it all there is a potentially viable and highly profitable business. Liberty Mutual must know this and it is getting the company for a song. We should at least ensure a quid pro quo for policyholders coughing up for the compensation fund is a mechanism whereby the company's potential profiteering on the back of policyholders is kept in check.

The Minister claimed the introduction of this legislation is not linked to the wider issues in the Quinn group. I hope the departmental officials, Mr. Sheridan and his colleagues, will pardon me if I admit I did not take in everything they said at the briefing the other day on this matter because it is all quite complicated. If I understood their briefing correctly, some €200 million will come indirectly out of the compensation fund to go to Anglo Irish Bank bondholders. The officials suggested this still worked out good for the Exchequer because in exchange for this €200 million, the bondholders would relinquish their claim on securities and assets of the Quinn group. Whether this is a good deal for the taxpayer is debatable.

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