Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

The Minister, Deputy Noonan, stated that the Government was launching the commission due to issues of serious public concern, but we should first consider how we got here and some of the questions that arise as a result.

The commission is not the result of the Minister's worry about public concerns. This commission has been dragged out of the Government. In fact, the Minister has engaged in deliberate attempts to bury the issue. For the past six months over the course of the famous 19 questions, he claimed that there was nothing wrong with the Siteserv deal and that the board of IBRC was happy, but he never mentioned that his Department had questions. We now know that he attended a meeting in July 2012 between the Department and the board of IBRC where the sale was discussed and, furthermore, that his Department had raised serious concerns about the way Siteserv was sold.

This raises two important issues. If the Minister now considers the issues at IBRC to be of public concern, why did he not order an inquiry a couple of years ago when he knew all about them? Considering the fact that the taxpayer has pumped €30 billion into the bank, everything and every deal done at that bank is of major public concern. Minutes show that his confidence in the board at that stage was "wearing thin".

The Minister undermined the limited democracy we have in the Dáil when he failed to answer fully the questions that were put to him with of the information he had. After he had been found out, he attempted to justify this by saying that Dáil questions got "precise" answers while freedom of information requests were for getting "background" information. The Taoiseach then tried to claim there were issues with how the questions were phrased. This is an insult to the representatives who are elected to the Dáil and those who elect them. The Minister was consciously engaged in a process of limiting the amount of information that would be released on this issue. This raises many questions about the so-called democratic revolution. The commission will investigate the role of the Minister - he should be the star witness in the case - but the Dáil should investigate how questions are answered in light of this. The arrogance and attempts to suffocate this issue by the Government are a national disgrace.

The cover-up stepped up a gear with the announcement of an inquiry, an inside job, with the special liquidator of IBRC, Mr. Kieran Wallace of KPMG, investigating the sale of Siteserv to Mr. O'Brien from IBRC in which Mr. Wallace's own company played an advisory role. In fact, he was the liquidator of Siteserv itself. He later joined the court attempt by Mr. O'Brien to block the release of a letter between himself and Mr. O'Brien that still has not been reported on. That inquiry was, according to the Tánaiste a week before its announcement, going to be an independent and "competent authority".

Transparency International raised issues with it. Even Alan Dukes thought it was a step too far for KPMG to investigate KPMG. We would still be having this inquiry if it had not been for the subsequent court cases and Government embarrassment. The Sunday Business Postquoted a Government source as saying that it would probably have gotten away with the KPMG investigation, but this was the only way to calm things down.

On the same day that the Government announced the establishment of a commission of investigation, the minutes of the 15 March meeting during which the sale of Siteserv was discussed amazingly appeared out of nowhere. Where were they? We know there were serious concerns in the Department about the sale. Surely information about an important meeting like this would have been kept and pored over. The Minister told the Dáil some weeks ago that a "thorough search of e-mails and documents" had not returned anything. He informed us that the taxpayers' bill was €9 million more than we had been told. More importantly, the statements of Mike Aynsley and Alan Dukes, who said that Richard Woodhouse, who looked after Denis O'Brien's accounts, had been moved away from the sale of Siteserv as they knew that Mr. O'Brien would bid, were contradicted. According to the minutes, Mr. Woodhouse was at this meeting. Is this a coincidence?

While the commission of investigation will look at approximately 40 different transactions at IBRC, we cannot and should not get away from the sale of Siteserv. The taxpayer picked up a bill for €119 million. Denis O'Brien bought a licence to print money through the imposition of water meters on communities and people who clearly oppose the meters and the charges. We need to go deeper into this sale. The board of Siteserv was allowed to conduct the sale of the company instead of IBRC, which was were tasked with getting the best return for the State. The board decided to exclude trade sales and instead entered into an exclusivity deal with one buyer, Denis O'Brien. The board of Siteserv decided to reject higher bids for the company. Siteserv's shareholders got a €5 million pay-out for a bankrupt company. Many of the directors of the company who conducted the sale were also shareholders. Arthur Cox acted for both the buyer and the seller in the deal. KPMG and Davy Stockbrokers acted as advisers to the sale despite many of the Siteserv board having links to KPMG, and many of the shareholders who got the €5 million being clients of Davy Stockbrokers.

The IBRC board and the board of Siteserv were keen to get this deal finished as quickly as possible. Were they trying to get the deal through before the new framework agreement came into place? There was a spike in the price of shares in Siteserv a few months before the sale. Would people buy shares in a bust company if they did not know there was a deal on the cards in which shareholders would get a pay-off? Why did Denis O'Brien buy a bust company in a field in which he has no experience? Was the water meter contract the reason he bought it? Bord Gáis, which was responsible for the decision in relation to water meters, told the Government it was unnecessary to install water meters before the charge came in. Nevertheless, the Fine Gael Minister, Phil Hogan, decided to push ahead with meters. Is Denis O'Brien the luckiest man in the world, given that he bought a company for a song and then won massive State contracts under a Fine Gael Government? We had the situation where people protesting against Denis O'Brien's company, GMC Sierra, installing water meters were jailed at his behest for breaking an injunction saying that they could not go within 20 m of a water meter installation. Incredibly, when other water charge protesters protested against the jailing of those people, the barriers used by the Garda were provided by Denis O'Brien's company at the expense of the State. Whatever way it works, this man wins and wins again. Now it has come to the fore that he was getting a special deal on his massive loans from IBRC. This was another subsidy from the taxpayer, who was hit twice after picking up the tab for his purchase of Siteserv.

The Moriarty tribunal report was finally published within a month of this Government coming to power. At that time, we were supposedly at the beginning of the so-called "democratic revolution" heralded by the Taoiseach. We were told the report would not "gather dust". Instead, it was supposed to become the springboard "to sever the links between politics and business once and for all and, in so doing, achieve three fundamental goals: stop the further pollution of our society; re-establish a moral code and order regarding public life; and, through that, restore public confidence in politics and government". Four years on, nothing has happened with the report. One of the central figures from the scandal that was the subject of the report, Denis O'Brien, is back in the middle of another scandal involving Fine Gael. Are we to be surprised?

While the Moriarty report sat on a shelf in the Taoiseach's office, Fine Gael went on a mission to publicly rehabilitate the image of Denis O'Brien. The Taoiseach was pictured with him at the New York Stock Exchange in March 2012. The Government then invited him to the Irish Economic Forum in 2013. This time last year, the Taoiseach took up an invitation from Denis O'Brien to speak at a broadband commission. The Tánaiste beat her chest about this in the Dáil, but funnily she then received a letter from Denis O'Brien querying her Dáil reaction given that she greeted him warmly when she met him in New York. Is this a severing of the links between politics and business? In light of what Mr. Justice Moriarty characterised as "clandestine" payments, and given that we are launching a commission of investigation, can we really say the links between politics and business have been severed? Ireland's richest man got a deal on Siteserv. Like a vulture, he has also swooped in also buy other assets, including the Beacon Hospital and Topaz. This is an indication, just as Denis O'Brien is a personification, of how austerity has worked for the 1%. Not only has he tried to silence the parts of the media he does not own in order to protect his own interests, but he also attempted - relatively successfully for a period - to silence the Dáil itself.

The terms of reference for the commission of investigation leave much to be desired. They do not meet the public demand to know what happened. The roles of the Minister and his Department must be examined carefully. Specifically, the Minister's role in how this scandal has evolved should be looked at. We need to know exactly what the Minister knew about the battle between senior figures in his Department and the bank. How much did he know about it? Did he fail to act in the public interest? Was the Minister aware of the role of Blackstone, which is a vulture capitalist fund that acted as an adviser to IBRC while at the same time buying some assets? Was he aware that protocol was breached in how it was hired? Will the Minister get the Central Bank to release its report on Siteserv and other assets, which has not been released?

RTE is gagged by Denis O'Brien and Kieran Wallace from reporting on a letter in which Denis O'Brien says he had a verbal agreement about preferential treatment from IBRC because it falls outside of the timeframe of the investigation. The terms of reference have to go beyond the date in February 2013. They should be expanded to 2015, when KPMG issued its report on the liquidation. The €10 million limit is worrying. The taxpayer has picked up a bill of over €1 billion in write-offs from IBRC. We need to see every write-off as this would potentially cover people of public interest, including politicians, judges and celebrities, who had debts written off without anything being heard of it. Similarly, the €4 million limit on favourable interest rates is too high. Any deal where a special interest rate or longer-term deal was made should be looked at.

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