Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

On Committee Stage, I raised a general query on ICAVs in respect of a number of reports in the case of the notorious sale of Clerys department store, where an ICAV was used by one of the key parties to the transaction and subsequently the company structure was divided and one of the entities that employed the workers was liquidated and that had no assets.

As such, the workers' entitlements to redundancy payments had to be paid out of the social insurance insolvency fund at a cost of between €1.5 million and €2 million. I raised a query in respect of whether the ICAV structure had been utilised in this case.

It was widely reported that there was a single property transaction in relation to a property in the vicinity of St. Stephen's Green owned by a very prominent person in Irish business life. That has been referred to on and off in the newspapers. Did the Minister or his officials have an opportunity to follow up on my query? In the first episode, people who had worked in a company for 44 years were thrown out on the street and stripped of all the entitlements for which they had contributed. In fact, they had to throw themselves on the mercy of the State's insolvency fund which, of course, the State facilitated. I ensured they got those entitlements as quickly as possible. I am concerned at what was paid out in a property transaction that was widely reported and not disputed to have yielded a profit for those involved, which was not huge, but was €20 million to €30 million. In terms of some of the figures which had been talked about earlier, it was relatively modest.

What happened in Dublin city caused a scandal to a lot of people as they could see the impact of it. I asked about it on Committee Stage. Can we get a comment? If it is possible to use an ICAV structure in this particular way, we must get some reassurance that the issue of what happened there can be addressed. There have been other reports in the media about one particular prominent property transaction where, again, there was a use of certain devices and vehicles. I must acknowledge that for decades in the Irish tax system, there has been a significant and large capacity to avoid taxes by using one device or another and by using different mechanisms by which disposals are made or a disposal is apparently made and then rested so that ultimately no disposal takes place although control and use of an asset may well pass. There are myriad devices which the people texting Deputy Stephen Donnelly tonight are very well up on. I would really like to know whether the Minister has a comment on Clerys because this sort of thing offends common decency. It is like the abuse of charities where Temple Street Hospital, for example, has to say it does not benefit from a particular charitable trust notwithstanding that it had been mentioned presumably as a possible beneficiary of a structure that in essence involves a particular company. I would really like to know what the answer to that is.

If the Minister is not able to give us an answer now, will he provide one at some stage and tell us about it? It is a good example of how on the one hand people are compliant with their obligations on PAYE and PRSI, as was the employer and owner of that business over generations, and then along comes a new structure that upends that and taxpayers generally pay insolvency of €1.5 million to €2 million. While it is small in the scale of what we have been talking about, the owners who flipped the asset and sold it on ended up with a relatively modest €20 million or so and were able to walk away. That is what offends people. I asked about it on Committee Stage and I would like to see if there is an answer at this point.

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