Rehab ‘will only answer questions on State funds’

The Rehab organisation has signalled to the Dáil Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that it will only answer questions at a hearing today in relation to State funding it receives.

Politicians on the committee have insisted they want more details from the organisation on pay, pensions and bonus payments for senior Rehab executives.

PAC members were told last night that solicitors acting for Rehab had contacted its parliamentary legal adviser yesterday indicating there would be restrictions on the issues the organisation would deal with in the hearing.

A note to the committee from the parliamentary legal adviser said: “Rehab are happy to appear before Public Accounts Committee to discuss the three areas outlined in a letter by Public Accounts Committee to Rehab but that they would not be in a position to discuss areas which did not fall within the Public Accounts Committee’s remit.”

It is understood the areas set out by the committee in the letter to Rehab were payments received by the organisation from the HSE, the training body Solas and the Department of Justice which came to a total of about €83 million.

However, senior members of the committee have signalled they would be looking for salary details for senior executives going back a number of years as well as information on bonus payments.

This month Rehab's board gave in to political pressure to reveal the remuneration paid to its group chief executive Angela Kerins. The figures showed her salary had risen to €240,000 from €234,000 in 2011.

Fine Gael TD Kieran O'Donnell, deputy chairman of the PAC, said last night: "I look forward to Angela Kerins coming before the Public Account Committee tomorrow and dealing with the issues relevant to the spending of €83 million of taxpayers' money and, obviously, specifically dealing with the issue of the level of salary paid and the basis and back-up for that."

Fine Gael TD Eoghan Murphy said: "In relation to the salaries issue which has been in the public domain, if we want to explore that area we would have to establish that there is not a sufficient separation of revenue streams between public and private money, the argument then being that public money would be acting as a subvention for private salaries."

In a legal communication to the committee last night, the parliamentary legal adviser said: "At 3.30pm approximately, today: Wednesday 26th February, 2014, I received a phone call from Anne Bateman, Philip Lee Solicitors, acting solicitors for Rehab.

“Ms Bateman informed me that Rehab are appearing before PAC tomorrow on a voluntary basis. She intimated that, whilst the message below would be made known to the committee by the Rehab witnesses tomorrow morning, as solicitors for Rehab she wanted the below message noted on the record: Rehab are happy to appear before PAC to discuss the three areas outlined in a letter by PAC to Rehab but that they would not be in a position to discuss areas which did not fall within PAC’s remit.”

The parliamentary legal adviser also said PAC did not in her view have “carte blanche to investigate the expenditure of all public monies” but was limited by its terms of reference to probes into accounts which were audited or reported on by the Comptroller and Auditor General.