Mary Mitchell O'Connor (Dún Laoghaire, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 36:

In page 58, between lines 17 and 18, to insert the following:

“Amendment of section 842 of Principal Act

92. Section 842 of the Principal Act is amended—(a) in paragraph (h), by the deletion of “or”,

(b) in paragraph (i), by the substitution in subparagraph (ii) of “in the State, or” for “in the State.”, and

(c) by the insertion of the following paragraph after paragraph (i):

“(j) that the person has contravened section 4 or 5 of the Competition Act 2002 or Article 101 or 102 of the Treaty on the functioning of the European Union.”.”.

This amendment addresses an oversight in the Companies Act 2014. The amendments are technical in nature. Section 842 of that Act gives the courts a discretion to disqualify a person from acting as a director of a company in certain circumstances. Before the enactment of the Companies Act 2014, those circumstances included where a person had committed civil or criminal breaches of competition law. Section 842 sets out the people who may apply to the court for such a disqualification order. Again, the law used to provide that the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission and, in some cases, the Commission for Energy Regulation, ComReg, could apply to the court for a disqualification order. Due to an oversight, these provisions were not carried over into the Companies Act 2014. These amendments rectify that error.