White-collar crime must be tackled

The Competition Authority is "well positioned to perform a crucial role in the economy", Tánaiste Mary Harney said yesterday following the publication of the authority's annual report for 2001.

Last year the authority opened files on 222 specific complaints. Some 160 such complaints were made in 1999. That increase over two years hardly warranted the Tánaiste’s description of a dramatic increase.

About a quarter of the latest complaints related the price-fixing, which has been estimated to cost Irish consumers around €635m a year and costs the Irish economy over €1.25bn annually. This is a criminal offence but nobody has been prosecuted for it. Our judicial system is choked by the prosecution of petty crime, while this kind of lucrative white-collar crime has been virtually ignored.