Mr. Raymond Byrne:

There were a couple of questions. Senator O’Reilly asked about the structure of the proposed corporate crime agency which is separate from the corporate enforcement authority. The proposal that the commission put forward would be that it would be a multi-disciplinary task force type agency that would bring under one roof the different kinds of skills that would be required in terms of investigation and prosecution all the way from, if one likes, end to end in terms of investigation and prosecution. There is no doubt that under the current arrangements the Garda has very specific skills. Some of the regulators liaise with the Garda in making reports. Of course there is a very skilled unit on corporate crime within the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. What the commission was proposing in its report last October was that there could be an agency which would have all of those under one roof from the very beginning. That was modelled very much on the model of the Criminal Assets Bureau. It is not that it will be reporting to CAB but that the model would be comparable with the CAB type of model. It would be multi-disciplinary and a task force-type agency.

It is very clear that in terms of compliance with company law, there has been, as Mr. Egan said, a sea change in the last 20 years or so. If we look at prosecutions outside the company law area, again the number of prosecutions that we see being talked about in the courts, where executives of companies who are engaged in tax fraud and in tax evasion, who are actually getting prison sentences, who are being prosecuted under regulatory powers of different regulators, there is no doubt that very serious convictions on indictment are being brought. There may not be a huge number of people who have served prison sentences. However, again we need to look at that in the context of the overall regulatory approach that criminal conviction ought not to be regarded as the only mechanism by which we ensure our compliance with legislation of a regulatory type.

The other proposals that the commission looked at in its report were recommendations looking at all of those other aspects as well as tightening up on some of the areas of criminal law.