Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will not take a deep breath, although one should at the result of this report. If I take a deep breath, the time will be up. I have approximately six minutes to deal with a report that is over 1,500 pages long and has taken seven years. The conclusions are absolutely damning. It is significant that the Dáil Chamber is empty. The first senior Minister to be present since the Taoiseach left the Chamber is here. That is telling. No backbenchers are coming in to take their slots. I seldom make these points because I realise how busy people are but this is a very significant report.

What is the report about? Seven years after the commission was set up, the report tells us that there was a sale of Siteserv, a business. It sold for €44.3 million. At the time it was sold, Siteserv owed €162 million to the entity that is known as IBRC. The business was sold for €44.3 million. At that point, the taxpayer had put €43 billion into IBRC. What is all this about? The business was sold at such a low value that there was a write-off of €118 million that the taxpayer is accountable for. We are hearing today that this is a waste of time and we are rushing in to get rid of commissions of investigation. I would say that is all premature. I would ask the Deputies, and particularly the Government and the Minister, to actually read the report. Let us find out what happened here. The entity which was Anglo Irish Bank, on the one side, is declared a saint. That is the corporate angel. On the other side is Denis O'Brien, the personal angel who did nothing wrong. In the middle, we have Siteserv, which was sold, and inexplicably it was left to sell itself with absolutely no oversight. If I have the chance, I might return to the issue of the theoretical oversight that was in place. Three gentlemen are named in the report, Mr. Harvey, Mr. Dix and Mr. McFadden. They seem to have run rings around the angel on one side and the angel on the other side, the angel on one side being Mr. O'Brien, who did not know anything about anything, and the IBRC on the other side, in respect of which the judge found it acted in good faith, all its procedures were right and all its policies were okay. How did this happen, then? How did these three wise gentlemen run rings around everyone for their own benefit? How did they conceal? How is there a list of unauthorised disclosures and disclosures that were never made? How did that happen? How were the minutes of the official meetings of the board given to the Department on a regular basis in a board pack, but the ad hocones were never given? How did all of this happen? How did a boot camp take place in St. Moritz, with two of the important figures in this, the mere mortals in the middle of the two angels that did everything wrong, of course? They misled and told untruths.

I will read some of those in a minute but they have been already read out by various Members. How did that happen? The sale was "tainted by impropriety". The report states that, "non-disclosures and concealments undermined the integrity of the Siteserv sale process and tainted it with impropriety." It goes on to state that, "The Company's decision... to grant exclusivity to Mr. O'Brien" and then continue with exclusivity to him was "tainted by impropriety". It further states, "The Company’s decision not to disclose Mr O’Brien’s Final Offer letter to the Bank... was tainted by impropriety". There is a whole list of these. In the time I have I cannot possibly set out it all but the report sets out details on Mr. Dix - a slip of the tongue might call it Mr. Fix but we will stick with Mr. Dix - Mr. Harvey and Mr. McFadden disclosing confidential information which, "was manifestly improper and wrong and undermined the integrity of the Siteserv sale process." The report states, "Mr Dix gave false, misleading and untruthful evidence in his sworn [evidence]". Mr. McFadden's evidence was not credible, according to the judge, on various aspects. The report states that, "The Commission does not accept Mr McFadden’s evidence or his submissions" on the matter and further states that it was, "entirely implausible" and so on and so forth.

All of the time the angel on the left knows nothing and the angel on the right knows nothing. These undisclosed negotiations that were going on led to the extraordinary situation, according to the report, in which Mr. Harvey, as CEO of Siteserv and Mr. McFadden, one of the two co-founders, negotiated a deal for themselves and nobody was aware of it, even though the process was monitored by the board of directors of Siteserv; the sale subcommittee; two sets of corporate finance advisers, KPMG and Davy; the chief financial officer, who has been mentioned already; the company solicitor advising both sides, Arthur Cox, with Chinese walls of course; and a representative of the IBRC, Mr. Hobbs. I said I would come back to the monitoring. We have an inexplicable decision by the IBRC to allow the sale to be managed by these men who have now been found not to be credible in any way. I do not know why that was allowed but then they think about that and say they will monitor it and they talk about getting PwC in to monitor it. They then do not do so but they get in Mr. Hobbs with his company. Mr. Hobbs is paid €5,000 per month into his company to monitor this situation. He is supposed to be at all of these meetings and report back but of course there is no written agreement with the IBRC. Even though it is angelic in all of this there is no written agreement so Mr. Hobbs goes to Siteserv and it determines what he should say and not say. There is a little bit of upset over that so something better is agreed but nothing is agreed on paper.

That is how this was monitored and we have Deputies here saying there is nothing in this. This is a shocking and damning indictment of how business was done. I will leave the conclusions to the judge but what I find difficult is an IBRC that knows nothing about anything and the judge says it acted in good faith. Nobody is asking how the procedures and processes in place allowed this to happen, what Mr. Hobbs was doing and what he was being paid for. Then we have the Department of Finance making a good decision to recommend an independent review, which was overruled by the Minister for Finance at the time, which he was entitled to do, so there was no independent review. Tremendous work is being done by internal members. The only time I see females mentioned is when they are doing the work in this. The rest was all male-dominated. They did tremendous work cataloguing and compiling everything. Later on it all goes missing and the judge finds it extraordinary that various documents go missing.

To be fair to my colleague I will stop but if the Ceann Comhairle has any influence I say this is a document that should be discussed for quite a number of hours on the floor of this Dáil so that we analyse what has happened and learn from it.

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