Very curious goings-on with GE, a company partnered to controversial Gama construction.
Yesterday Socialist Party TD Joe Higgins named the company involved as General Electric, a partner of the construction company Gama.
He said General Electric in Clonshaugh in north Dublin, “sets up puppet companies so that it can set about a legal swindle to compel the IDA to pay it millions of euro for land belonging to the Irish people”.
He said General Electric had used the proceeds of the sale to “finance its industrial diamond innovations to force a redundancy deal on 50 workers, whom it bullies and pressurises into accepting, so it can replace them with cheap labour for its industrial diamond enterprises”.
General Electric set up a “puppet company” allowing it to buy IDA industrial land outright and lifting restricted usage. The IDA practice of selling property was through a 999-year lease. IDA property leased in 1981 to one company was subsequently sub-leased twice and an anomaly allowed the lease to be “extinguished”.
The Government was even forced to:
rush emergency ground rent legislation through the Dail and Seanad earlier this year when it emerged that the State’s ownership of a further 700 IDA properties was at risk because of the legal loophole.
I never heard about that, strangely enough.
But GE say they’ve sold this company. Is this true?
Yes I was just about to post their response, which was in the IT on Saturday.