Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I am happy to clear this up. The project information memo for any Government contracts says that the investors pay their own bid costs. Indeed, the process of the bid went on for a number of years. It would have involved many millions of euro of investment and when the company won the bid and set up, it repaid the costs of the bid from the investors' own capital back to those same investors again, in proportion to the amounts of money they had spent. It is the repayment of expenses. It comes out of money put in by the investors. It is not in contradiction with the information note, which says the State does not pay the costs of the bidders. The investors pay their own costs back. Those costs have to be audited. It is a company that has audited accounts. There would be receipts for every piece of expenditure and that is the whole story.

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