Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

One of the questions that has arisen in relation to this section is around prosecutions of breaches of company law and whether the Bill will rectify this issue. The answer to that is that corporate offences are by their nature difficult to investigate. The fact that white collar criminals have gotten off lightly in the wake of the economic crisis should not lead to the conclusion that the law is flawed. Corporate criminal investigations often require the gathering and examination of large volumes of complex documentation, which can be painstaking and time consuming and necessitates wide consultation with experts, including forensic accountants and lawyers. Equally, people may be unwilling to give evidence voluntarily in circumstances where they have worked with or have close business ties to an alleged offender. As a criminal must be proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt, many plausible cases of wrongdoing will never be successfully prosecuted. This must be taken into account in terms of the context of this section.

Section 798 as drafted under existing law is unchanged.