Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Minister may have misheard me earlier. I was not acknowledging that this was an issue of tax deferred or an issue of timing. What I was saying was that this was what the Minister would claim. I went on to point out that it may not be the case because the companies may not be here in ten years' time when all of the capital allowances are used. Allowances for intangible assets, which have patent protection would have lost value and so on and the structures could have changed. Had we taken that approach with Nokia, for example, as has been pointed out by the author of the report, we would have been caught well short. Companies change, move, change their structures and so forth. We know that Apple did it in 2015, so it is not just a case of money that will come to us at a future point in time.

The Minister says that this was the right decision at the time but it was not. He said that it was the right decision at the time with the knowledge that was available. What was that knowledge? What we know now is that the Minister's predecessor, his Fine Gael colleague, was lobbied through the Department by multinational companies, a multinational tax planner and by the representative body for US multinationals and lo and behold, who benefits from this? Who benefits, not to the tune of a couple of bob here or there, a couple of thousand, million or even billion euro? We are talking about massive amounts of money and it was the American multinationals who benefitted from the decision. They lobbied for this. They asked the Government to do this. They asked the Government to increase the cap. A multinational tax planner argued in a submission to the Department that the multinationals needed certainty about the onshoring of intellectual property, IP, because the Government was changing the tax residency rules. If there is one reason to vote against this Finance Bill, it is this. This amounts to €850 million next year, the year after and the year after that. It is €850 million that the Minister is deciding not to collect now because he wants all of the IP that was onshored to be able to be used against future profits these companies may generate in order that they can write down their tax liability to close to zero.

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