Mr. Brian McHugh:

As the Deputy will be aware, we carried out a process of screening these complaints. We had well over 100 complaints from various parties, including allegations of cartel in this sector. We looked into it carefully and spoke to a number of parties about what evidence there was. We put quite an amount of resource into it and spent nearly a year looking at all aspects of the quite varied complaints. There was not just one. We then set out and published the reasons we did not open a formal investigation. They are still on our website in terms of what we found and that the evidence we had did not justify opening a full investigation.

Cartels by their nature are secret. The norm in a cartel would be to have the evidence of a form of a contract and an agreement between those parties to fix prices, for example. One of the very common steps one would do in investigating a cartel is carry out raids. We would need a warrant to do raids. In order to get a warrant one must go to a judge. There is due process and one needs an element of evidence to be able to do that, and rightly so. We all would agree with that. We did not have that level of evidence to open an investigation into a cartel on the back of the complaints and the work we did. We set that out and the reasons for it.

As I have said previously and I will say again today and in the future, we welcome evidence from anyone with regard to a cartel. We will look at any evidence we get. During the process of the complaints we spoke to multiple parties across the industry and-----