Commissions of Investigation
Dail Éireann — 2023-05-09
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Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

It is worth reminding ourselves what is the essence of this. What was being investigated was a massive rip-off and loss for the public to the tune of €118 million written off by IBRC, formerly Anglo Irish Bank, to the benefit of the Denis O'Brien-owned Siteserv. The fundamental conclusion is that the IBRC was misled by Siteserv directors over the transaction. The phrase "tainted with impropriety" is mentioned an incredible 44 times in the report. In that context, it is very unfortunate that 37 other transactions will not be investigated. They were identified on the basis that they were transactions where the bank suffered a net loss of at least €10 million each. Given the findings of what happened with Siteserv, whereby the public was definitely ripped off, there is a possibility that similar practices took place in those other instances. While I understand the complexity of pursuing some of these issues, simply to say "No, we can't go there" is quite unfortunate.

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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/2023-05-09/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:51+00:00
Sitting date: 2023-05-09