Paul Appleby’s office is not geared up to properly fight white-collar crime

YOU HAVE to wonder whether all the fuss about Paul Appleby’s efforts to retire early is entirely justified – and whether the Government is making him stay on for its own selfish reasons.

Appleby, the Director of Corporate Enforcement, is a fine, hard-working public servant who has done a lot of good work in improving the level of compliance with company law among Irish businesses.

What he is not – and has never held himself out to be – is some sort of special white-collar crime fighter. But that has not stopped the Government from pushing Appleby’s office into this role to cover up the failure of the criminal justice system – the Garda and the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) – to step up to the mark.

You only have to look at the enforcement office’s own literature to realise it is the wrong agency for the job. Its primary role is to ensure compliance with company law. The powers of the director allow him investigate, prosecute and sanction people who break the law.

The sort of thing the instigators of the Appleby’s office had in mind was the investigation of a company that went bust to make sure its directors had not kept trading when they knew it was a lost cause.

The office is organised, staffed and structured, right down to the original appointment of Appleby, to carry out this type of work. Giving it more powers and more work to do will not change this.

Those in the office work hard and do a good job, but asking them to be the lead investigators into what happened in Anglo Irish Bank and bring them to justice is like asking the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) to investigate a mass shooting at a hospital.

Such a hypothetical event might involve the breach of numerous hospital rules Hiqa is responsible for enforcing, such as not allowing firearms on the premises, but that is beside the point.

The issues at Anglo Irish Bank and elsewhere are very grave and lie squarely in the realm of a specialised financial crime investigation body. For a country which shows such a talent for white-collar crime, it’s amazing we don’t have one.

Instead, we have Appleby’s office, struggling along and receiving regular ear-bashings from the judges of the Commercial Court because – surprise surprise – it is making very slow progress at a job that should be done by somebody else.

The office’s true value seems to be to provide some sort of cover for the Government whenever public anger over Anglo Irish Bank reaches fever pitch. We are due another bout of such national hand-wringing shortly when the first three billion odd of taxpayers’ money is handed over in the form of the first repayment on the Anglo Irish promissory note. This might have had something to do with the twisting of Appleby’s arm to make him stay on for six months.

How we have arrived at such a preposterous pass is one of the many inexplicable facts about contemporary Ireland.

It has been obvious for a very long time that the criminal justice system here has a real problem with the investigation and prosecution of white-collar crime.

Such crimes are difficult to prosecute at the best of times, but other jurisdictions do seem to be able at least to bring them to trial, even if not always successful.

It has to be remembered that for every high-profile “perp walk” of an American executive after hands were found in the till, there are hundreds of others bogged down in the US justice system.

But this does not undermine the value of bringing prosecutions or explain the extraordinary inability of the Irish system to even get people into court.

The deference shown to the DPP’s office has made it impossible to ask why this is the case. We are led to believe the very fabric of the State would collapse if the DPP is even asked to explain how it dropped the ball.

As we have found out to our cost, a much more real threat to this State is its inability or unwillingness to tackle white-collar crime and the culture it has spawned over the last two or three decades. That has played no small part in the collapse of the banking system and the economy.

There is little that can be done about that apart from bringing any offenders to justice. The current system – in which Appleby’s office has been placed centre-stage – will make heavy weather of it.

Ultimately, the decision to prosecute will rest with the DPP’s office, which seems to attach no weight to the preventative effect of bringing cases even if they fail to secure prosecutions.

Where the cause of this reluctance lies is hard to judge from the outside. Presumably it has its root in the interpretation by the DPP of its role and duties.

Taking a good hard look at removing that roadblock would be more useful than forcing Appleby to stay on for six months.