Friday, 20 June 2025

The Great Refugee Scam

Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth Purchase Orders for €20,000 or above available at the link below, (please note that links open in new tabs).

I intend further articles on various aspects / anomalies & analysis of the companies concerned, plus a retrospective look at historical Quarters from the Dept. Also the result of Freedom of Information requests will follow. The easy way to follow this progress would be via X/Twitter, if they restore my account)

https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-children-disability-and-equality/collections/department-of-children-equality-disability-integration-and-youth-purchase-orders-for-20000-or-above/#2025

This lists payments over €20k with regard to Dept costs, a total of €415.8M for this Quarter 1
This is in pdf form, I have converted this to xlsx and google sheets, the Google sheet version is here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SVrtPJWoVKeD7t1IKQzGPwBChaIucU3m/edit?gid=145650989#gid=145650989

Note: that there may be payments here not attributable to the refugee or international accommodation aspects but to other Departmental costs. It will most likely require a FoI request to obtain the granular detail. 


Given the fact that the top 5 gross out at €52.4M that leaves approx €363.3M for further analysis

I conducted analysis of the approx 2000 payments using Anthropic Claude AI - there are three presentations one for each of Jan, Feb,Mar together with some commentary.

Serious Issues

Whilst there are serious issues here these could be said to be primary:

  1. a number of the Irish companies are what is known as Unlimited, this means they do not file detailed accounts
  2. a number of the companies appear to be 'related' in some way to other companies on the list
  3. most criticaly a number of the companies are overseas, Isle of Man and others. This means no % of their profits flow to Ireland as taxation.
  4. the ownership of those overseas companies appears nebulous at best
Refugee housing contracts are being awarded to offshore companies, this raises multiple risks:
  • No local accountability,
  • Profit extraction with no reinvestment,
  • Tax evasion or avoidance,
  • Reduced transparency about who owns or controls the properties,
  • Potential human rights compliance failures with no enforcement recourse.
Under EU Procurement rules Ireland can legitimately exclude IOM Companies
  • The Isle of Man is not part of the EU, not part of the EEA, and not a party to the EU public procurement regime.
  • It is a British Crown Dependency, but excluded from the UK–EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) for procurement unless expressly included — which it is not.
  • Therefore, Irish contracting authorities have no obligation to treat Isle of Man firms as eligible bidders under EU procurement law.

Circa 600 Unique Entities

There are circa 600 unique entities on the list and I have begun to drill down into their data. I would be happy to take 100 of these.

Perhaps there are volunteers out there who would take 50 or 100 each. Please use my contact form here to get in touch. https://www.dd.ie/p/contact.html

I do have an X account for 19 years under my pseudonym Drax but I am currently being restricted. https://x.com/Drax because of what X deems unacceptable commentary in the context of the genocide in Palestine & the total disregard for international law given the attacks on Iran.

Brief Overview



Full 'analysis' of this aspect here:



Full Analysis for Jan 2025
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/252f31af-8629-4689-b811-e84dbe2ec48a





Full Analysis for Mar 2025
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/8db362cb-8250-483b-ad86-ef28e25ce8b7

Top 5 Data Anomalies Identified:

1. Duplicate Payment Anomaly
Campbell Catering Ltd has multiple identical payments on the same dates:
4 identical payments of €148,512.65 on 23/01/2025 (Ukraine program)
2 identical payments of €459,028.29 on 20/02/2025 (IP program)
2 identical payments of €377,451.99 on 20/03/2025 (IP program)
Suggests possible data entry errors or unusual payment splitting practices

2. Extreme Payment Variation Anomaly

Several vendors show suspicious payment amount ranges:
Bridgestock Care Limited: €26,460 to €1,937,811 (73x difference)
Allpro Security Services: €26,599 to €1,920,466 (72x difference)
Travelodge Hotels: €64,288 to €2,675,003 (42x difference)
Such extreme variations within single vendors may indicate billing errors or misclassifications

3. Payment Clustering Anomaly

Unusual concentration of payments on specific dates:
13/02/2025: 196 payments (potential bulk processing)
20/03/2025: 140 payments
12/03/2025: 113 payments
May indicate batch processing dates rather than actual service delivery dates

4. Cross-Program Activity Anomaly 

Vendors serving both Ukraine and IP programs simultaneously:
Allpro Security: €2.5M Ukraine vs €3.5M IP
Bridgestock Care: €200K Ukraine vs €6.6M IP
Multiple other vendors operating across both programs
Could indicate operational flexibility or potential misallocation between programs

5. Payment Amount Outlier Anomaly

Payments significantly above normal patterns:
Several payments exceed €5M (e.g., Cape Wrath's €11.6M total in March)
Abbeytrill Sagcon: Consistent €700K+ payments monthly
Outliers >€559K threshold appearing regularly
May indicate institutional contracts or potential data validation issues


Given the recent debaucle over payment of pensions to fomer State employees it would come as no surprise if 'mistakes' were being made. Howver these may just be operational anomalies. A request under the Freedom of Information will be required for clarification.

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Ends


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