I move amendment No. 1:
In page 2, after line 43, to insert: " `company' means a public Company within the meaning of the Companies Acts, 1908 to 1924."
On Committee Stage, we had some quite considerable discussion in reference to the manner in which the company would exercise the functions allotted to it under Section 3. One of the difficulties that has arisen in any effort made to investigate whether taxpayers' moneys have been expended in a proper way has all too often been the fact that the company to which such moneys were made available was not a public company within the meaning of the Companies Acts, 1908 to 1959. If a company is not a public company within the meaning of those Acts, then an investigation in the Companies Office by any person anxious to trace what has transpired in relation to taxpayers' money expended by the State is bound to be brought to a most unsatisfactory conclusion. If a company is not a public company, the only information in the Companies Office consists of the names of the directors, the names of the shareholders and particulars of actual mortgages, debentures or other charges.
If State money is being made available under this Bill to any particular company, it is highly desirable, not merely in the interests of probity— about which I make no suggestions— but in the interests of the company concerned, that the whole payments should be made in a clear and above-board way. The only way in which that can be done is if the company receiving the benefit files in the Companies Office, and is under an obligation so to file, its balance sheet and its profit and loss accounts. If it is filing in the Companies Office its balance sheet and its profit and loss accounts, then it is possible for anyone to inspect those accounts and to see whether the ratio of private enterprise money, on the one hand, and the money that is being put up by this new company, on the other, bears a proper relationship to the proprieties of expenditure by the State.
The possibility of such inspection negatives unnecessary rumours, negatives wild rumours, and will ensure beyond question that the matter will be seen in its true and proper perspective.
I see no reason whatever why a company that is going to receive the substantial State assistance envisaged in this Bill should shy away from having its profit and loss account and balance sheet filed in the Companies Office in the ordinary manner. The effect of that could be achieved in another way but the simplest way of all, in my view, to do it is to provide that it will be only public companies which will be assisted under this Bill by the company that the Minister is setting up.