Rip-off culture - More power needed to fight cartels

The report by the National Competitiveness Council which underlined Ireland’s rip-off culture and pointed to the country being the most expensive and least competitive in Europe was a damning indictment of commercial practices here.

What compounds the situation is competition law is almost ineffective in combating cartel arrangements.

A former member of the Competition Authority, Patrick Massey, who was also its enforcement officer, affords an enlightening insight into what he considers are the weaknesses of the present system and how it might be improved.

During the past 12 years the Oireachtas has enacted three separate statutes designed to strengthen competition law. To date this legislation has yielded virtually nothing in terms of exposing and punishing anti-competitive behaviour.

He points out that although the authority’s annual reports indicate it has received several hundred complaints of alleged cartels and abuses of dominant positions over the past seven years, it has brought only a handful of civil actions and one criminal prosecution.

Obviously, there is a fundamental problem which has to be addressed either through extra resources or a more stringent regime in tackling abuses of the competition legislation. Cartels maintain high, inflated prices to guarantee their profitable balance sheets and by their very covert nature are difficult to prove.

Possibly, an investigative body assigned to the authority and modelled on the Criminal Assets Bureau could prove more effective.