Micheál Martin (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

In The Sunday Timeslast Sunday there was an article concerning the sale of Siteserv to Millington under the ageis of the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation. The article was based on freedom of information documents the newspaper had secured from the Department of Finance in the form of memoranda. Any reader of the article would have to come to the conclusion that there are grave concerns about how that company was sold.

There were a number of such concerns. I pay tribute to the Independent Deputy Catherine Murphy, who has doggedly pursued this issue for well over 12 months, if not longer, through parliamentary questions and so on. In the beginning she was told by the Minister, Deputy Noonan, that he was satisfied that the best interests of the taxpayer were met in the sale of this company. We know that IBRC sold Siteserv at a loss of €105 million. We know that the legal advisers acted for both the purchaser and the seller. We now know that the financial adviser Davy, which was advising the company but whose fundamental obligation was to its own shareholders and not the taxpayer, recommended a payout of €5 million to the shareholders to induce them to sell. Therefore, in a company that owed the State €150 million, the shareholders and directors, five of whom were, I think, clients of Davy, got €5 million. Trade buyers were excluded on what I would consider to be relatively spurious grounds and there were reports of other companies that wanted to bid higher but were spurned. Latterly, as Independent Deputy Catherine Murphy was putting her questions, the Minister revealed somewhat more in answers to parliamentary questions, and outlined all of the concerns I have outlined as being concerns of his officials. We have now learned that there were two separate reviews of the deal, one by Department of Finance officials and another by Central Bank officials. There are huge potential conflicts of interest all over this deal. Let us remember that we are talking about a company whose subsidiary, Sierra, went on to win the largest contract to install water meters and has now become a very profitable company in itself.

See this speech in context