The Dáil Public Accounts Committee has decided to hold a meeting with the Revenue Commissioners tomorrow about investigations which have been carried out into the holders of Ansbacher accounts.

However the names of former senior politicians alleged to have engaged in tax evasion by holding such accounts will not be revealed during the public hearing.

The committee is also expected to decide whether it will call before it the senior official in the Department of Jobs and Enterprise who last month submitted a dossier containing allegations of tax evasion by a number of former senior politicians.

The Irish Times reported last month that Gerry Ryan had submitted the dossier to members of the committee under the provisions of the Government's new protected disclosure legislation.

Committee chairman John McGuinness said that it had never been the intention to identify publicly those against whom allegations had been made.

“It has always been the understanding of members of the committee that it was never about individuals but rather the systems, processes and the monies connected,” he said.

Examination

The committee also wrote to solicitors representing Ann Lenihan, the widow of the late former tánaiste Brian Lenihan snr, setting out that no individual would be named in its examination of the Revenue Commissioners.

Mr Lenihan was one of a number of former senior politicians named as allegedly holding Ansbacher accounts in the dossier drawn up by Mr Ryan.

Mrs Lenihan, through her solicitors, had written to the committee seeking access to documentation it had regarding the allegations before it began any hearings on the issue.

It is understood that in the letter sent after the meeting, the committee said that it did not possess the dossier drawn up by Mr Ryan and therefore could not provide it to her.

The dossier was sent to individual members of the committee last month rather than to the committee secretariat.

Mr Ryan had served as the designated officer investigating the Ansbacher tax evasion controversy between 1998 and 2004.

Uncovered

However, he expressed unhappiness at how information he said he had uncovered was dealt with by ministers of various governments and by a variety of State agencies.

In the dossier Mr Ryan maintained that a former employee of Guinness & Mahon bank informed him of the existence of “a very secret list” of offshore account holders, separate from the holders of Ansbacher accounts who were identified on foot of an official report a decade ago.