Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

As I said, there is not tax forgone because businesses can offset previous losses against future tax liabilities. A change was made in 2014 for a good public policy reason. Banks were allowed to use those tax credits as part of their tier 1 capital ratio. That then allowed us to spend less money recapitalising the banks. It would have cost us another €3 billion at that time to recapitalise them otherwise. In order to ensure that we get revenues from banks, a levy was introduced.

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