Mr. Raymond Byrne:

I thank the Chairman and the members of the committee. I am very happy to be involved in this. As to how we hope we will assist with the committee’s scrutiny of the general scheme of the companies (corporate enforcement authority) Bill, in some respects the report we published last October overlaps with the committee’s current deliberations. There is no doubt, however, that some other aspects of our report which had a different focus may not overlap. Nonetheless, we thought it would be useful to give an overview in the written statement of the general report. One of the areas in which the committee might have a particular interest in considering the scheme of the Bill is the recommendations we made on what we described as the core regulatory toolkit that financial and economic regulators should have, and I might focus on this.

The background to the report published in October last year was that, after extensive consultation on the content of our current programme of law reform, which was approved by Government in 2013, a number of submissions asked us to look at the whole area of the regulatory powers of financial and economic regulators. While the general background to the report was no doubt heavily influenced by the financial crisis that emerged in 2008, many of the submissions that we were sent in respect of the consultation on that fourth programme also recognised that, other than the Central Bank, which has very significant regulatory powers, there are other regulators that did not have as wide a regulatory toolkit. I refer to bodies such as the Commission for Communications Regulation, ComReg, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission and the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement, ODCE, although I know that in some of the literature there is a debate as to whether one could describe the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement, ODCE, as a regulator as such. It certainly has some of the attributes of a regulator. We were also very conscious of the fact that while obviously we have been through huge trauma as a result of the banking crisis, the next major crisis of systemic proportions for the State might not come from the banking sector. The focus of our report therefore was not just on financial regulation but on other sectoral economic regulators as well.

We are very conscious that we are an advisory body and that what we recommend and include in our report, including draft Bills, are therefore matters for others to determine as to whether there will be any law reform arising from our recommendations. Of course, these are matters for members of this committee and other Members of the Houses of the Oireachtas. We are aware that a number of recommendations of the report are under consideration. On page 3 of the paper we circulated to the committee, we mention just some of the main recommendations, including the establishment of a statutory corporate crime agency and the idea that financial and economic regulators should have the power to impose significant financial sanctions and to make regulatory enforcement agreements. As I mentioned, the committee may want us to look at the latter area. We also looked at our existing fraud offences and made recommendations as to how offences under the theft and fraud offences Act might be amended. Then there is the question as to whether a statutory system of deferred prosecution agreements should be introduced.

I will make just brief comments on the proposal in the commission’s report on a corporate crime agency because I know to some extent from the deliberations that have taken place here that there has been a debate about the overlap with the ODCE’s reforms in the corporate enforcement authority Bill. The commission’s proposal on a corporate crime agency was focused on issues such as major corporate fraud and corruption-type offences and the need for a separate agency to examine these kinds of offences. We certainly did not make a recommendation directly related to reform of the ODCE. We were very conscious that this had been debated in the Government’s 2017 paper on measures to improve the effectiveness of the response to so-called white-collar crime. We understand, therefore, that this issue of a corporate crime agency, or what could be described as a serious fraud and corruption agency, is being considered by the group chaired by the former Director of Public Prosecutions, James Hamilton. We understand that this group is due to report later this year.

I thank the Chair and members of the committee for their attention. We are very happy to take questions.