Taoiseach's Meetings and Engagements
Dail Éireann — 2022-12-13
============================================================

Richard Boyd Barrett (PBP), Dún Laoghaire

To be clear about what I was saying about Debenhams, the Debenhams group which had been taken over by three vulture funds including two banks, Barclays and Bank of Ireland, saddled a floating charge of €200 million on the Irish operation. That would have been clear to anyone who was looking at it and should have been clear to the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment when KPMG informed it of the liquidation. It demonstrated that this was a cynical, tactical liquidation that was orchestrated precisely to the day a year in advance in order to ensure that 1,000 workers who had given decades of service to that company would lose their jobs and not get a cent because artificial debts were imposed on the company. An ex-employee of KPMG, which is, I remind the House, the liquidator, was involved in this transaction that took place a year to the day before those workers received their notice. Had it been received anything less than one year before then, the €200 million debt would not have been there. It could not have been done. It explicitly exploited a loophole in company law which the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment should have known about and which KPMG should have and I suspect did know about. Did it tell the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment what was going on? These are the questions that need to be answered. I am asking the Taoiseach to look into them, as he was the Taoiseach when all this happened, for the sake of the 1,000 workers and others who could face a similar fate.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2022-12-13/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:25+00:00
Sitting date: 2022-12-13