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IT IS “UNLIKELY” that Deputy Mick Wallace’s company, MJ Wallace Ltd, will be able to repay a €2.1 million Revenue settlement, the TD said today.
Speaking on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland radio programme this morning, Deputy Wallace said that “bar some bank were to come in and rescue the company, which is very unlikely in this climate, it is very unlikely that the Revenue will get the money”.
The company reached a €2.1 million settlement with Revenue over undeclared VAT, as reported in a story which appeared in today’s Irish Times.
Deputy Wallace acknowledged what he did was wrong, but told Morning Ireland that he did it to try and save his company and the jobs of 60 employees.
I do feel responsible for it. I do not feel good about it.
He said that he owed money to banks “who took gambles by giving me the money same as I took gambles by borrowing it”.
I am far from proud to be owing the Revenue money, same as I owe some contractors money. I had a very successful business.
I didn’t go mad. I had property worth over €70 [million]; I owed about €40 [million] and a banking crisis arrived and my property over about an 18 month period became worth €20 [million], probably less now.
Wallace said he did his “living best all through that time to try and keep the company afloat”.
He admitted that he underdeclared the VAT “because I still believed I could rescue the company”, and recognised it was wrong to do so.
The Deputy added that he thought he could save the company and pay the VAT the following year, but when that did not work out, he made his declaration to the Revenue.
He added that a €19.4 million judgement brought against him by ACC bank “was the nail in the coffin for the company”.
When asked if he is a fit person to remain in the Dáil, Deputy Wallace said he believes he is, and that though what he did was wrong, he did it in good faith.
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Not enough socialism, apparently.
@P.J. Nolan: essential ingredients of successful durable socialism is a brutally heavy handed military government, fake elections and an elite oligarchy. It never works without those pillars.
@alphanautica: you mean like norway, sweden or finland? Awful kips huh? Thank god we live here.
@Fake Avast: Yeah it was the USA that made Venezuela into an ungovernable socialist hellhole and not the policies of Hugo Chavez as he rots in the ground
Venezuela is AAA-PBP-SF’s role model economy.
This article is clearly as cheap shot at undermining their economic expertise.
@alphanautica: #pearseknowsbest
@Honeybadger197: Corbyn should head over on a mission. Give him a good PA system on the main square, they’d all settle down quite quickly once the hear what he has to say.
@alphanautica: There is virtually no policy in Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto that isn’t already followed in the Nordic states. Try playing another record, the Venezuela analogies are looking every bit as threadbare as Lynton Crosby’s IRA smear campaign.
@Harry Whitehead: you might want to get on to Corbyn so: ‘Chavez showed us that there is a different and a better way of doing things’ are his own words coming out of his own megaphone.
All those Corbyn cultists from earlier on should take note that this is his vision of a country that “got socialism right”.
How did we accept austerity so easily? Was it because it mainly dehumanised the poorest & sickest citizens especially Labour and FGs extremely regressive 5 budgets from hell.
Labour you are Still 4-6% in the polls cos u lied to the most vulnerable and caused homelessness ti become the norm for the badly off and people are years now waiting in agony on hospital waiting lists.
No matter what happened in Venezuela it wasn’t these young people’s fault more the fault of older people. If it was my child I’d want them where they were safe which is here.
The Journal goes straight for the click-bait kill as usual. A man wasn’t set alight, he was beating an abandoned state-owned motorbike with a stick, the petrol tank exploded and his clothes caught fire. It was a horrific event, but please don’t resort to lazy journalism for the sake of dramatic headlines
…oh, the unending joys of socialism!
Hopefully Venezuela has an Enda Kenny rising up through the political ranks who can rescue their country from the brink.
As happened in Ireland, we barely escaped the deathly clutches of the hard left, those naive self-convinced loons beset on suffocating economic improvement through hard work and instead wanting to suck an economy dry with their inert socialist begging bowl.
Perhaps there will be Enda Kenny tshirts circulating soon in Venezuela, modelled on Che Guevara, another proud Irishman of principle.
He’s not asking anyone to pay his tuition, the chap was robbed by his government like all the other students who have been robbed of life savings who came here to study. He is highlighting a situation that a lot of Venezuela’s who are here are in. Venezuela is in a dire place and the people are being killed in the streets everyday. They are being starved and robbed. How you can make light of that is beyond me.
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