Cianan Brennan:  Taxpayer will have little to gain from damning report on Siteserv

State’s final report into investigation of IBRC will likely sink without a trace.

Billionaire businessman Denis O’Brien caused a storm after Catherine Murphys’s use of Dáil privilege to make claims that Mr O’Brien had received favourable interest rates from the IBRC when repaying loans.

THE State’s final report into the Commission of Investigation into IBRC, specifically into the sale of the company Siteserv in 2012, was published last week, after seven long, stuttering years.

It’s taken so long to be delivered that the current Taoiseach was a keen critic of the process from the opposition benches back when it all began in 2015.

The commission’s findings are noteworthy and damning. It found that the IBRC — the amalgam of former bust banks Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide — was misled into the transaction which saw Siteserv sold to a company named Millington for €44m.

It made findings of at best questionable behaviour among key named stakeholders — with the noteworthy exception of billionaire Denis O’Brien, Millington’s owner — to the transaction.

The phrase “tainted with impropriety” is mentioned on no less than 44 separate occasions across the body of the report.

It states that it can be concluded the Siteserv transaction was not commercially sound in the manner in which it was conducted, the decisions made, and the outcomes achieved.

Before the sale, Siteserv was indebted to IBRC to the tune of €150m, all but €31m of which was written off as part of the transaction. That’s a pretty sweet deal.

The report found however that IBRC made its decision to approve the sale “in good faith”, albeit based on “misleading and incomplete information” provided to it by the company itself.

At the same time, bonuses of more than €800,000 were being paid to Siteserv’s directors on completion of the sale, a company that was about to cost the taxpayer €119m.

That’s quite appalling. As a journalist, I would ordinarily be of the opinion that even if things won’t change, poor behaviour in official circles should still be pointed out.

While no difference may be made by doing so, you’re absolutely guaranteed that nothing will happen if such an approach isn’t taken.

And there’s the overarching public interest of allegations of corporate wrongdoing being exposed and given its five minutes in the spotlight.

However, the Siteserv investigation really would shake that conviction to the core.

For starters, the commission itself ended up costing almost four times as much in legal fees alone as the €8m that it found IBRC had lost after being underpaid as to Siteserv’s true value via the transaction.

What does the taxpayer gain?

Now that the report has been released, after the endless interminable delays to its publication, what is the taxpayer truly going to gain from its publication?

The final product is 1,500 pages long. Who on earth is going to read it? It has more than 80 pages worth of findings of facts alone?

And yet in all likelihood, the vast majority of the country’s population can probably barely remember what the issue was in the first place.

Two things external to the report felt especially noteworthy in the aftermath of its publication — the statements of Denis O’Brien and Social Democrats co-leader Catherine Murphy, who, as a then Independent in 2015, had done as much as anyone to bring about the commission of investigation by using Dáil privilege to make claims that Mr O’Brien had received favourable interest rates from the IBRC when repaying loans.

The commission found there was no substance to those claims.

Mr O’Brien had caused a storm following Ms Murphy’s pronouncements in the Dáil chamber in May 2015 in attempting to restrict the media from reporting on those claims via a High Court injunction.

“Deputy Murphy used Dáil privilege to make false allegations against me,” Mr O’Brien said.

“Dáil privilege ... should not be used as a tool of political weaponry to be called into service for political advancement where the truth is the ultimate price.”

He further bemoaned the fact that Ms Murphy had never appeared as a witness for the commission, and that Justice Brian Cregan had declined to criticise the Kildare TD.

'Clear vindication'

Ms Murphy, unsurprisingly, took a different tack to Mr O’Brien in responding to the commission’s findings, describing the “damning report” as a “clear vindication” of her decision to use privilege to raise the issues which had surrounded the Siteserv transaction.

“The biggest loser in all of this was the State,” said Ms Murphy, a sentiment which it is difficult to argue with.

Other political statements regarding the report’s publication were thin on the ground last week.

The Taoiseach described its findings as a “cause for concern. There are very serious findings there in respect of the behaviour of a number of individuals involved in the sale,” he said.

Aontu leader Peadar Tóibín went in a bit harder.

“Who is going to be held to account over Siteserv?” he asked. “The next step is critical. What accountability will be brought to bear for this action? We can’t have spent tens of millions of euros on a report that gathers dust on a shelf.”

Despite the Taoiseach’s assurances that the report has been referred to the Revenue Commissioners and other government agencies for their consideration, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the report will indeed probably sink without trace — the majority of its impact having already been absorbed by the sheer amount of time it took to compile.

So yes, my faith that the investigation was a worthwhile endeavour is shaky.

That doesn’t mean that I think the commission shouldn’t have happened. It means it feels like it will make little difference.

After seven years worth of effort, it surely deserved more than that.