CAB's new adversaries will be better acquainted with legal battling than the blue-collar criminal, writes Paul Cullen.
Corruption is, in the words of one investigating garda, "a furtive crime". Both the giver and the receiver of money have a shared interest in keeping quiet. They deal in cash and verbal agreements, so very often no paper trail is left.
This is one of the reasons allegations about wrongdoing in Irish planning remained just that - rumours - over many decades.
It also explains why, in spite of all the tribunals and other inquiries set up in the past few years, not a single person has been successfully convicted on corruption charges arising from these investigations.
Former minister Ray Burke currently languishes behind bars, but for tax offences, not corruption. Retired Dublin Corporation official Mr George Redmond, meanwhile, had his conviction on corruption charges quashed, though not before he had served most of his sentence.
Yet the reports of the planning tribunal squarely name both men in connection with the receiving of corrupt payments.
These reports also identify a handful of wealthy business people as having paid these bribes.
The tribunal report on Burke, for example, clearly named builders Mr Joe McGowan and Mr Tom Brennan as the main bankrollers of the politician's early career, and implicated them in a series of corrupt payments in the 1970s and 1980s.
Both men have long since retired from housebuilding and live in splendour on stud farms in Ireland and England.
Meanwhile Mr Mick Bailey, who was implicated in the corrupt payment to Burke in his home in 1989, is one of the biggest and most successful builders on the east coast.
His company, Bovale Developments, recorded profits of more than €55 million in 2003.
However, nothing (apart from the Burke prosecution) has been heard from the Garda and the Criminal Assets Bureau since Mr Justice Feargus Flood's seminal report on Burke was published in 2002.
The prosecution of Redmond, a drawn-out affair which was based on an unreliable witness and was eventually quashed, demonstrated the perils of trying to secure a conviction under existing corruption legislation.
Some of the acts Redmond was charged under date back to Victorian times and are ill suited to modern conditions, not to mention the current heightened demand for tackling white-collar crime. Three separate Garda investigations of planning corruption in 1974, 1989 and 1993 failed to get anywhere in terms of prosecutions of major figures.
Figures such as Burke or Redmond, while rich, are hardly multimillionaires. However, the developers who paid them massive bribes over decades to have land rezoned have amassed huge fortunes, which remain untouched.
The latest amendment to the Proceeds of Crime Act may go some way towards tackling the problem as well as redressing the balance between those receiving the bribe and those paying it.
The new legislation allows for the seizure of suspected bribes by a process broadly similar to that currently used by the Criminal Assets Bureau against "ordinary" criminals.
Crucially, the standard of proof to be applied in court is that applied to civil proceedings rather than to criminal proceedings. In other words, it will be a case of "on the balance of probabilities" rather than "beyond all reasonable doubt".
This reform will add a new string to the bow of gardaí investigating corruption, but it won't change things overnight.
For a start, investigators can't use the tribunal reports as a basis for securing a court order; they have to build up their own case.
Second, the subjects of potential orders, many of them now colossally wealthy and well connected, are likely to fight tooth and nail against any attempt to seize their assets.
CAB's new adversaries will be better acquainted with legal battling than its targets from the blue-collar criminal community.
Some may well attempt to contest the application of new legislation to actions carried out years and even decades ago.
Third, many live outside the jurisdiction now, at least in the legal sense. Their wealth has been moved abroad, to offshore locations hidden behind layers of shelf companies and trusts engineered by expert advisers.