Not one white-collar criminal ever jailed, admits watchdog
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Monday July 05 2010
NO ONE prosecuted for white-collar crime by the corporate watchdog has been jailed in the 10-year history of the office.
Sending criminals to jail "does not happen in company law" an official at the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE) admitted.
The ODCE, which last week warned that it could take up to two years before any prosecutions arise from its investigation into Anglo Irish Bank, said that it had referred only five cases to the Director of Public Prosecutions since 2001.
The revelation comes despite warning about the threat posed by white-collar crimes.
And gardai from the fraud squad have warned that they are expecting a raft of financial crimes sparked by the recession.
But Kevin Prendergast, the ODCE's corporate compliance manager, told senior gardai and lawyers at a lecture on white-collar crime that there had never been a successful prosecution for insider trading or market abuse in Ireland.
And he warned that any such convictions would be difficult to prosecute because of the "incredibly high" proof thresholds for white-collar crime.
"We have never seen anybody sent to jail," Mr Prendergrast told delegates at the lecture organised by the Irish Women Lawyers Association in Dublin last Saturday.
"Incarceration, in practical terms, does not happen in company law."
Delegates were told that white collar crime, including misconduct in the banking and corporate sectors, posed as serious a threat to Irish society as 'ordinary' lawlessness, including organised crime.
Criminal law expert Shane Kilcommins, a lecturer at University College Cork, said that for too long Ireland had endorsed a two-tier system that has facilitated serial impunity for white collar crime.
Meanwhile, it created an entire architecture of increasingly repressive measures for ordinary crime.
Mr Kilcommins, who said white-collar criminals should not be spared jail, accused successive governments of "hyper legislating" in the area of organised crime. But it seemed there was no political will to tackle white-collar crime. "The threats posed by the banking and corporate sector is very real and we have seen this over the last number of years, particularly with redundancies," said Mr Kilcommins.
She said that white-collar crime often appeared "more remote, more victimless and often is less dramatic".
But she added: "Misconduct in the banking and corporate sectors, in the distortion of competition in the market, pose as much if not more of a threat to our security than ordinary crime."
Senior Counsel Mary Ellen Ring said the ODCE's confirmation that the vast majority of its convictions were secured in the District Court begged the question as to whether we were "living a lie" that Ireland prosecutes white-collar crime
She said there must be a way of clearly defining company law breaches and bringing them to court -- before society's faith is totally undermined in the concept of prosecuting white-collar crime.
- Dearbhail McDonald Legal Editor
Irish Independent
