GSOC report on Clare Daly TD

GSOC investigated:

In January 2013, Deputy Clare Daly, TD for the Dublin North constituency, made a complaint to GSOC, arising from her arrest on 29 January. Significant aspects of her complaint concerned the alleged unlawful disclosure of information to the media, both about the fact of her arrest and about whom she requested to be called at the time.

GSOC concluded:

…while it is not possible to state that this information was released by a particular Garda or any other identifiable person, there does appear to be sufficient evidence to state, on the balance of probabilities, that some of the detail relating to Deputy Daly’s arrest emanated from within the Garda Síochána organisation and were made available to the media in an unauthorised manner.

The Ombudsman Commission is of the view that Deputy Daly was entitled to the presumption of innocence and that she had a right to privacy. These rights appear to have been infringed by the release of such information.

Gene Kerrigan opinion piece.

Here is the report in full:

Dept of Finance tax strategy group documents

Thanks to Mark Tighe from the Sunday Times for the documents below. Mark did a story in February, including:

Civil servants warned the finance minister three years ago that the “double Irish” tax loophole was damaging Ireland’s reputation and threatening its ability to defend its corporation tax rate.

In internal briefing documents released under a freedom of information request by The Times, the Department of Finance’s tax strategy group said that the “double Irish” — a tax-shifting scheme that allowed companies to reduce tax bills by transferring funds between internal companies based in Ireland and units in the Caribbean or the Netherlands — risked undermining the legitimacy of the country’s corporation tax strategy.

The documents were only released after Tighe appealed to the Information Commissioner. The Commissioner’s decision, as well as the released documents are published below.

Continue reading “Dept of Finance tax strategy group documents”

NAMA’s plans for delivering housing

Some time back we obtained the release below. It’s a very interesting set of various Department of Finance documents and it contains a number of elements:

1) Speaking notes for Michael Noonan for a NAMA offsite meeting in March 2015
2) NAMA’s written advice to Michael Noonan for residential delivery
3) NAMA’s suggestion that there be a Chief Government Adviser on Residential Delivery
4) A summary brochure of NAMA’s residential delivery to September 2015
5) Examples of houses for sale from NAMA projects, with sales/sq foot prices redacted
6) A September 2015 letter from NAMA to Noonan, on what NAMA can deliver
7) Project Arrow details
8) Noonan’s response to a private members bill

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Lee Buchheit bondholder email to Department of Finance

In today’s Sunday Business Post, Jack Horgan-Jones interviewed New York lawyer Lee C Buchheit. Buchheit is known as one of the world’s experts on sovereign debt crises. As the article says, he’s “the guy who governments fly in to tell their creditors they won’t be getting their money back”.

In 2010 the Irish government secretly called in Buchheit’s expertise. It was kept secret, according to the article, because if word got out, the markets would know Ireland planned to burned bondholders. In correspondence published for the first time below, Buchheit is shown to be aiding the Department of Finance with drafting legislation that would have allowed for the burning of bondholders.

Buchheit was asked if it would have been possible to restructure the liabilities of the Irish bank to keep the estimated €9bn liabilities from migrating to the shoulders of the Irish taxpayer.

“If you ask me, the answer has to be yes. Come on. We’re not children. The markets are not children. If they think they can jockey the official sector into paying them out, of course they’ll do it. But if they don’t think it’s happening they will restructure. They’ve done it all around the world, forever.”

Thanks to the Sunday Business Post for making the documents available.

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