Current Account: Current Account's heart sank when he saw last week's Finance Bill, for it showed that he and Mrs Current Account had missed out on a fabulous money-saving opportunity: splitting conveyances in two in order to pay a lower overall rate of stamp duty - how obvious!
Just by cutting the purchase of Current Account Castle into two separate bits, we could have saved tens of thousands of euro. All we would have needed would have been a co-operative solicitor and a Revenue Commissioner who was too busy with other important business to notice our strategy. Bingo!
Alas, this time of potential bounty has now passed, with the closure of the said "tax-avoidance" scheme in the new Bill. The question is, of course, did anybody actually get away with it?
The Revenue Commissioners tell us that the approach was attempted by very, very few parties and, furthermore, was stopped where the Revenue realised what was going on.
This suggests, however, that there may have been some who managed to escape the attention of the Revenue Commissioners and actually got their split purchases over the line. Happily for those buyers in question, the Revenue's systems do not currently allow for detailed analysis of this nature so it looks like they might be safe from difficult questions from their local, friendly taxman - at least for now.
Banagher farmers not sweet on Greencore
Banagher looks like it just got beat in Greencore's sugar shake-up. Along with the closure of the plc's Irish Sugar plant in Carlow, the group is also closing a malted barley plant in Banagher, Co Offaly.
The Irish Farmers' Association (IFA) vice-president, Mr Ruairidh Deasy, raised the issue at yesterday's Greencore annual general meeting, where the mood was anything but sweet.
Some of the product from Banagher is supplied to Guinnesses under contracts that traditionally benefited some barley growers in the midlands. However, the farmers who now benefit from those deals are to lose out.
Greencore will instead get farmers in the Athy area, where another malting operation will take up Banagher's capacity, to fulfil the contracts. Not surprisingly, Banagher's growers are not going to allow themselves get beaten without a fight, and they plan to ask Greencore's malting division to continue taking their barley and process it in Athy instead.
Greencore is already trying to work on what could still be the tricky problem of getting the beet originally destined to Carlow down to Mallow, both in the long and the short term. It looks like it could soon be adding malting barley to its logistics problems.
DUP takes issue with ESB moves in North
Despite its dominant presence in the electricity market and its decision last year to apply for a large price rise, one sometimes has to feel a little sorry for the ESB.
This week the State-owned utility found itself taking flak from the usual suspects such as Viridian. However, ESB also found itself drawing fire from an unlikely source - the Rev Ian Paisley's DUP.
The party's East Antrim Assembly member George Dawson accused the ESB of ripping off Northern Ireland customers. This is because the ESB is building a new power station in Coolkeragh, Co Derry, but is planning to sell some of the output in the Republic.
The new plant benefited from two financial contributions, according to Mr Dawson. First, a tariff was put on electricity bills across Northern Ireland to pay for a gas pipeline to Coolkeeragh. In addition, he said the cost of the removal of the old Coolkeeragh plant was paid for by Northern Ireland Electricity - in other words, by customers throughout Northern Ireland.
He said, in effect, Northern Irish customers were paying for southern infrastructure.
"The consumers in the Republic will benefit - at our cost. This is a public scandal," he thundered.
Probably wisely, an ESB spokesman yesterday refrained from getting into a dust-up with the DUP.
