AER LINGUS workers have not received tax demands from the Revenue Commissioners in relation to the “leave and return” scheme, Siptu said last night.
The issue was not tax demands, as widely reported, but a tax rebate being claimed by a number of workers in Shannon, Siptu divisional organiser Gerry McCormack explained last night.
The controversial scheme involved more than 700 staff who took voluntary redundancy and were rehired within weeks on inferior terms and conditions.
Revenue told the individuals that they would not grant the top slicing relief because it did not believe the scheme was redundancy, Mr McCormack said.
Siptu yesterday insisted that the redundancy agreement made with Aer Lingus in 2008 was a genuine scheme. However, Siptu said it accepted assurances from Aer Lingus yesterday that the agreement was legally sound. Sources close to the Government have said that it took Aer Lingus over a year to reply to queries raised by the Department of Enterprise Trade and Innovation in relation to the scheme.
Aer Lingus staff received their redundancy payments even though the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Innovation has not yet formally approved the scheme. The department has recently faced criticism over a two-year delay in making a decision.
Highly placed sources said that the department had recognised that the arrangement was “ground breaking” under existing legislation governing redundancy payments.
Sources said that the department had raised with the company the issue of how such redundancies could fall within existing legislation in early 2009 but that it received no reply for 13 months.
It is understood that the Department is still awaiting further response from the company regarding other queries before it can make a final decision on whether it represented a genuine redundancy scheme.