Revenue chairman's meeting with AIB official `not relevant'

The chairman of the Revenue Commissioners did not tell the Public Accounts Committee about a meeting with a senior AIB official the night before he gave evidence to the DIRT inquiry, because he did not think it was relevant.

Mr Dermot Quigley said there was nothing "improper" about the conversation he had with Dr Donal de Buitleir, AIB's former head of group taxation, the night before he [Mr Quigley] appeared before the committee.

"I listened to what he had to say. I told him I was going to make as full a statement as I could make in the interests of accountability at the Public Accounts Committee the following morning and that's precisely what I did."

Mr Pat Rabbitte, however, suggested that it was "very undesirable practice" that he should meet Dr de Buitleir and not mention it, especially when the matters were in the public domain and concerned a liability against the bank of anywhere between £100 million down to £35 million.

Mr Quigley said it did not arise and he did not see it as relevant. "I gave my evidence unaffected by the visit of Dr de Buitleir."

Later, a senior Revenue official told the inquiry he never gave the bank any "comfort" that its DIRT liability had been "satisfactorily resolved". Mr Sean Moriarty, assistant secretary for human resources with the Revenue, said he was not in a position to, nor did he, offer any comfort to Dr de Buitleir or AIB. He said he left the investigative area in January 1997 and had had no contact whatever with the investigation side since then.

AIB executives told the inquiry they felt the matter of DIRT liability had been "satisfactorily resolved" in part because the Revenue never came back to them about it and in part because they believed they had received assurances in 1998 from a senior official, Mr Moriarty.

Dr de Buitleir told Mr Sean Ardagh he had lunch with Mr Moriarty either in the National Gallery or the University Club sometime in June or July 1998. They were friends from when he himself worked in Revenue and they met every few months.

Dr de Buitleir said he could not recall exactly what Mr Moriarty said, except that the matter "would probably be OK. I don't think he was definitive about it".

Earlier, Mr Quigley told the inquiry he could not "quarrel" with the allegation that Revenue would not have gone after AIB for its arrears liability if an article, written by Liam Collins in the Sunday Independent, had not appeared.

The story, about a possible £600 million in bogus accounts in AIB in the early 1990s, appeared in April 1998. Mr Quigley said the Revenue sought documentation following its publication.

He pointed out, however, it was essentially a self-assessment tax and the onus was on the bank to get back to Revenue and say it had reclassified accounts and what the payments were. As far as DIRT tax was concerned, at the time Revenue had "very limited powers to deal with that" in the context of the financial institutions.

"People who are involved in self-assessing their own taxes - if that were to be regarded as a `write-your-own-tax-bill', it would be a disaster for confidence in the tax system. We check through our audit programmes and we do those every year with ordinary businesses. Only now are we in a position to do that in the financial area."