Lowry: Revenue raid invaded my privacy
TD’S hand-written notes and a bank statement seized
DISGRACED TD Michael Lowry has denied he’s in a tax dispute with the Revenue Commissioners after a swoop on his home.
The Independent TD has accused the State’s tax office of leaking details of the raid at his home in Holycross, Co. Tipperary on Tuesday.
Speaking yesterday for the first time since the raid, he said some 15 officials scoured his house with a ‘fine tooth comb’ and left an inventory of documents they seized.
Mr Lowry said he had left a key with his neighbour to l et a handyman enter his home.
He said: ‘Over the weekend I had a problem with an AGA cooker in my home and I expected that I
‘I’m baffled as to why they did it’
wouldn’t be i n my house on Monday to l et i n the service engineer, so I asked a neighbour to let the engineer into the home.
‘The woman who was still in the house saw that the house was being surrounded. She saw them coming in the back door and she was obviously petrified and she though, naturally enough, that the house was being broken into, to be robbed. She was traumatised by the event, I spoke to her this morning and she is still distressed by the incident,’ he told his local radio station Tipp FM yesterday.
Mr Lowry said he was ‘baffled’ as to why the raid was carried out.
‘I had no advanced notification of it. There were a total of 15 people involved. They came into the house, they did a methodical search; they went through the drawers, the cabinets, the presses, they went through all the f urniture, the wardrobes and all the clothing in the various bedrooms and went through the beds, literally everything with a fine tooth comb.
‘It was a fruitless exercise; I was baffled as to why there was any necessity to do it. They left an inventory of how many documents were taken; political statements that I had made, hand-written notes and a bank statement’.
Mr Lowry also has an office in his house said there was nothing of any significance taken.
The Tipperary North TD has been enveloped in controversy for nearly two decades. The Moriarty Tribunal report, published in 2011, found that he helped businessman Denis O’Brien acquire a mobile telephone licence in 1996. Mr Lowry was Communications Minister in a Fine Gael-led Government at the time.
Yesterday he said he has always co-operated with the investigations.
‘What concerns me is that there was no need for this. I have been co- operating with the Revenue since the McCracken Tribunal’. He also denied that he had refused to give information to them in the recent past. He said: ‘The Revenue at all times have received total co- operation, not just from myself but from my accountancy advisors. I have no bill from the Revenue, I have a tax clearance certificate for my business, I’ve a personal tax clearance certificate, there is no outstanding bill, I’ve not been furnished with any bill and anyone who knows me knows I pay my bills, I run my business properly. I always pay what is owed
‘I run my business properly’
in a timely way.’ He said it is the first time the Revenue has swooped on his house or business, and believes it tipped off the media.
‘They were here for three to four hours. I was appalled; it was an outrageous invasion of my privacy and my family home. Everyone f ound t hei r presence both imposing and intimidating.
‘I have never experienced this before. When it happened I was taken aback because I did not believe the Revenue had those powers.
‘ They were within their legal rights but I have to say it was heavy-handed and totally unnecessary and I have communicated my feelings to the Revenue Commissioners through my solicitor. To be quite honest, I was upset about it and I am still upset. What I noticed in the documentation that was left was even if I wasn’t in the house, and if the house was locked, they had a locksmith on standby, so they had the power to break-in if the woman hadn’t been there.
‘On Tuesday, all evening I held it to myself and said nothing not even to my close friends but I knew it was inevitable and that they [Revenue] would l eak i t and sure enough the media descended in huge numbers on my office yesterday and camped outside my house. They do these searches, they want them to be high-profile, they tip the media off, then you have the media circus that follows’.
A Revenue spokeswoman said they couldn’t comment on individual cases.
MICHAEL Lowry was found by the Moriarty Tribunal to have abused his position as a minister to exercise a ‘disgraceful’ and ‘insidious’ influence over the granting of the State’s second mobile phone licence to Denis O’Brien’s Esat consortium.
The tribunal concluded that Mr Lowry, who is also by his own admission a tax evader, had mislead the Cabinet, his party leader John Bruton and his own civil servants.
Now the independent TD for Tipperary North has complained about an ‘outrageous invasion’ of his privacy by the Revenue Commissioners.
What barefaced effrontery! The only privacy Mr Lowry should be entitled to is in a 6ft by 6ft room with a cot and a steel wash-hand basin.