Fifty years of omerta on Ireland’s biggest company

38 July-August 2023 July-August 2023 39

Then Fianna Fáil leader, Jack Lynch, had intervened

to ensure that Roadstone was the preferred bidder

for Irish Cement and former Taoiseach Seán

Lemass was appointed as the ﬁrst Chairman

of the new Cement Roadstone Holdings

s I walked into the elegant Carlisle

room at the Royal Marine Hotel in

Dun Laoghaire in April last for CRH

plc’s latest AGM, many thoughts

ﬂashed through my head. Why am

I here? Why have I been in Court with CRH plc

for 27 years? Why are the political parties and

regulators protecting CRH plc? Why has my

family been blacklisted by the banks for over

a quarter of a century? Where are the media?

Then it dawned on me like an epiphany. This

is no ordinary plc, this is a maﬁa complete with

criminal structures and behaviour and the

usual protection rackets with every

machination of State and the banks,working

arm-in-arm to protect what I now believe to be

an OCG [Organisied Criminal Group]. The gang

leader, Albert Manifold delivered his usual

CRH systemically ﬂouts competition and

company law with impunity

By Séamus Maye

silky-smooth State of the Nation address. But

the meeting was fronted by a decidedly

uncomfortable Chairman, former Bank of

Ireland CEO, Richie Boucher. You see Richie

was tasked with shielding the Board of

Directors from my unwelcome intrusion.

Richie didn’t deny any of my allegations, just

an unconvincing reply, “that’s your

perspective Mr Maye”.

So just how did this OCG survive and thrive?

CRH plc has been Ireland’s largest company

for several decades and now ranks itself as

the world’s No. 2 in the construction materials

sector. The company is synonymous with

controversy going back at least to the 1969

takeover of Irish Cement.

Then Fianna Fáil leader, Jack Lynch, had

intervened to ensure that Roadstone was the

preferred bidder for Irish Cement and former

Taoiseach Seán Lemass was appointed as the

ﬁrst Chairman of the new Cement Roadstone

Holdings (now CRH plc). The late Des Traynor,

arguably Ireland’s most corrupt business

ﬁgure, also ﬁgured on the board of the newly

created monster.

Don’t worry, no cross-party stone was left

unturned, CRH stalwart Tony Barry had his

brother Peter to call on as long-time Fine Gael

Deputy leader.

Labour too was captured, it was under

Labour’s then Minister for the Environment,

Dick Spring that the illegal cement certiﬁcation

scheme was introduced in March 1983.

The Progressive Democrats hued and

pued about taking down CRH. In the end,

Mary Harney and Michael McDowell played a

good cop/bad cop blinder and frustrated any

attempt to hold CRH to account. The PDs’

betrayed everything they (apparently) stood

for in their eorts to protect this leviathan.

The Greens too hued and pued under

John Gormley and his lieutenants but when

they went into government in June 2007, they

too back-pedalled and acquiesced in the

protection racket around CRH plc.

That’s all the parties that have been in

power since 1969.

By 1973, Ireland was immersing itself in the

EEC. It had to introduce several new laws and

regulations in order to make Irish Law

compatible with EU Competition (Antitrust)

and, later, Money-Laundering, Laws.

This is where it gets really sinister. Ireland

POLITICS

CRH nd Quinn

The competition

including me

Fifty years of

omerta on Ireland’s

biggest company

38 July-August 2023 July-August 2023 39

One Prime Time team described the

proposed documentary as “the best we

have ever worked on because it involves the

political parties, the banks, Ireland’s largest

company (CRH plc) and ﬁnally, the victim

(Maye family)”

brought in (on the face of it) strong competition

law, starting with the 1991 Competition Act,

the successor to the Restrictive Practices Act

1972, which created the Competition

Authority. This was followed by the Company

Law Enforcement Act 2001, which created the

Oce of Director of Corporate Enforcement.

However, these regulators have proved

chimerical. The lengths that these supposed

regulators have gone to protect CRH plc is

staggering. Taxpayers have been forced to pay

enormous sums of money to fund these inept

regulators for over ﬁfty years.

So, what of the Garda, Ireland’s primary

crime busters? The author has presented ﬁles

to the last four Garda Commissioners

complaining about unprecedented economic

crime (allegedly) committed by CRH but there

has been an ongoing failure to act. Indeed a

Wexford family has made very serious

allegations of fraud against CRH plc but while

gardaí initially got involved and acknowledged

the fraud to the Somers family, the family were

subsequently told by local gardaí that, “we’re

killing the case”.

And what of the legal system? Suce it to

say that my family’s proceedings (best known

as “the Framus case” have been running for

27 years and the, almost identical Goode

Concrete case for 13 years with little progress

made. Add the Ballymore Properties pyrite

case and we have a cumulative 50+ years of

litigation against CRH plc, without a blow

being landed. The above-mentioned Somers

family have now spent eight years seeking

effective legal representation against a

background of chronic barriers to justice.

Typical of the connections that would make

you paranoid is the conduct of the late High

Court Judge, John Cooke (RIP). In the mid-

eighties, John Cooke, then a senior counsel,

was engaged by Hytherm, a new entrant to the

EPS (insulation panels market). John Cooke’s

mission was to obtain an injunction against

CRH plc, the dominant player in the EPS

market, to stop its relentless predatory

pricing, collusion and market-sharing. Cooke

was successful with his quest. So impressed

was CRH plc with Cooke’s smooth performance

against it, that it signed him up to appeal the

EU Commission decision of 30 November

1994. It has also been established that Judge

Cooke began accumulating CRH shares in

1994 and continued doing so, at least until

2010 (that we know of). Neither Judge Cooke

nor CRH plc made disclosures in relation to the

Judge’s relationship with CRH. Judge Cooke

went on to give three damaging judgments in

the Goode Concrete case (subsequently set

aside by the Supreme Court) and to strike out

the Framus proceedings in their entirety in

2012.

The Framus case is a spectacular example

of the failure of the Irish Justice system. This

can only be a failure by design on the part of

the legislature with the object of protecting

the defendants, CRH plc and its associates

Kilsaran Concrete, Readymix plc and Grafton

Group subsidiary, CPI.

Essentially, the Framus case alleges margin

squeeze, price manipulation and abuse of

dominant competitive position. CRH was

allowed to acquire Irish Cement in 1979 and

also got control over Irish Industrial

Explosives, giving it access to two of the key

ingredients in concrete manufacturing. It then

relentlessly raised prices of both products

while dropping prices for concrete products (it

was already the dominant operator in the

concrete products market). This was the

classic ‘margin squeeze’. Independent

concrete producers were making CRH rich

while CRH was making them poor. Very many

independents were forced from the market

while a host of others were secretly taken over

by CRH, which gave an illusion of competition

in the market.

In my most recent sworn adavit, November

5th, 2021, I made inter alia, the following

averment, “I say that the CRH defendants’ and

Kilsaran Concrete have been making a

mockery of the Courts over the past 25 years

by masquerading as two entirely separate

companies. I say further that I have no doubt,

from my intimate knowledge of the

construction materials sector, that defendants

are funding their defence of these legal

proceedings from the proceeds of crime, while

my family remains blacklisted with banks.”

There have been decisions that defy logic,

e.g. the High Court Discovery decision of 2002

(Judge Daniel Herbert) and the subsequent

decision on appeal by the Supreme Court.

Unfortunately, this terrible decision is now the

‘authority’ on discovery, so there is ongoing

suering for others.

Three of a host of barriers to justice are: a)

there are still no class actions in Ireland,

though representative actions are imminent;

b) third-party funding is illegal; and c)

contingency fees are illegal.

Fcing nother CRH AGM

40 July-August 2023 July-August 2023 PB

The lengths that supposed

regulators have gone to

protect CRH plc is staggering

So where does one turn, in circumstances

where one’s opponent is enjoying

unprecedented levels of protection from the

establishment; the media of course.

In the past,there has been some terriﬁc

reporting on CRH plc, Mick Cliord (Irish

Examiner); Ted Harding, Vincent Browne and

Kieran Wood (all Business Post); Jim Clarke

(Ireland on Sunday); Gerry Byrne (Sunday

Independent), Barry O’Halloran (Irish Times),

Brian Lavery (New York Times) and indirectly

Trevor Birney (recent author of ‘Quinn’). Sadly,

reporting has entirely dried up, as CRH and its

government associates have wielded their

inﬂuence and shut media down.

A special word for RTÉ: the author has been

approached on eight separate occasions to do

a ‘Prime Time’ programme on CRH plc and the

construction materials industry. On these

eight occasions, I was informed by RTÉ

insiders that the proposed programme was

pulled by senior RTÉ personnel. Back in 1998,

one particularly experienced team described

the proposed documentary as “the best we

have ever worked on because it involves the

political parties, the banks, Ireland’s largest

company (CRH plc) and ﬁnally, the victim

(Maye family)”.

Now, to put things in further context, let’s

briefly take a wider look at CRH plc’s

international activities:

•

Ireland: It is not possible to elaborate on CRH

plc’s controversial activities in a short article.

However, apart from the myriad anti-

competitive complaints going back over 50

years, some will remember the secret sale of

Glen Ding Woods to CRH plc by the State, the

Ansbacher Scandal, the Moriarty Tribunal’s

failure to investigate CRH plc, Judge

Moriarty’s €500k shareholding in CRH plc,

and illegal dumping and quarrying. The DPP

failed to prosecute CRH plc for illegal

dumping adjacent to Glen Ding in County

Wicklow and CRH’s failure to comply with a

High Court Order (in 1996) to reinstate lands

from which it had legally extracted 67,000

tonnes of material (Wicklow County Council

was the Plainti). Then there is the ﬁnancial

relationship between CRH plc, Des Traynor

and Charles Haughey, former Taoiseach. All

of this and more was contained back in 2000

in a lengthy submission to the Moriarty

Tribunal by Philip Lee Solicitors, on behalf of

the then Quarry and Concrete Family Alliance.

Apart from an eventual token look at Glen

Ding, the submission was binned.

• Last July, I wrote to the CRH dominated Irish

Concrete Federation [ICF] detailing how CRH

controls the sector through a myriad of

control mechanisms and explained the huge

ramiﬁcations of the so-called ‘Mica Crisis’

from which CRH and ICF, the protagonists,

are receiving total immunity. The cost of

deleterious building materials will come to

many billions of euro, which government is

intent on passing on to taxpayers. Why? I

ﬁnished with the following,

• “The problem for ICF is how to unravel itself

from the clutches of CRH plc. I say this

notwithstanding the diktat of omertá which

has served the construction materials sector

so eectively for decades. It would be

erroneous to assume that omerta will

continue to protect the sector”.

•

Outside of Ireland here are the main

controversies:

•

Europe: On 30 November 30, 1994, the EU

Commission ﬁned CRH plc subsidiary, Irish

Cement Eco, €3.5 million for playing a lead

role in the pan-European cement cartel.

Notwithstanding the extensive appeals

process through the EU Court of First Instance

and EU Court of Justice, the ﬁndings and ﬁne

were substantially upheld by the European

Court of Justice.

• US: CRH settled with Miracon Technologies

in 2015, Miracon had accused CRH of patent

infringement, breach of contract,

misappropriation of trade secrets, tortious

interference with existing contracts, tortious

interference with prospective relations,

unjust enrichment, fraud and conspiracy

against defendants.

•

US: The Port Dock antitrust case taken

against CRH plc concerned the supply of

aggregates to the New York market. This

case had substance but was struck out on

certain legal technicalities around

“standing”. The court stated that “in crafting

the following summary of facts, the Court

accepts all of the factual allegations in the

complaint as true”.

• US, West Virginia: CRH settled a price-ﬁxing

and market-sharing case with the State of

West Virginia in October 2020 for $101m plus

costs; price-ﬁxing is a criminal oence under

the US Sherman Act.

• Northern Ireland. Both CRH and Sean Quinn

were found to have ﬁxed cement prices.

Author Trevor Birney in his book ‘Quinn’

states that the ﬁles in this case have been

closed until 2081. Birney goes on “but what

is known is that in the ﬁles is the evidence –

and a subsequent guilty verdict – that Sean

Quinn colluded with his once most vicious

enemy, Cement Roadstone Holdings to ﬁx

the price of cement (products) in the North

from 1985 to 1992”.

•

Poland: CRH plc was ﬁned $530,000 in

2007 for obstructing the Polish Oce for

Competition and Consumer Protection’s

investigation into allegations of its

involvement in a price-ﬁxing and market-

sharing cartel. In 2009, the same oce

ﬁned CRH plc $26million for price-ﬁxing and

other anti-competitive behaviour. Back in

2005, a Polish businessman, Marek Dochnal

told a parliamentary inquiry that he had

paid a $1million bribe on behalf of CRH plc

to the former Minister for privatisation,

Wieslaw Kaczmarek, in 1995, to facilitate

CRH plc’s takeover of Ozarow cement plant

in Poland.

•

Ukraine: Back in 2003, Ukraine’s People’s

Deputy, Taras Steskiv, wrote an extensive

article on the privatisation of Ukraine’s

cement sector, in which he states that a

large part of Ukraine’s cement and

industrial capacity had been bought for as

little as one twentieth of its value by

transnational businesses, including cement

companies such as CRH plc, Lafarge and

Germany’s Dyckerho. Deputy Steskiv had

been Deputy Chair of the ad hoc Verkhovna

Rada Commission investigating into the

violations of the rights of Ukrainian

stakeholders in Nikolayev cement by

Lafarge and others. The Commission found

that after privatisation of the cement sector,

cement exports were banned by these

transnational companies, thus cutting o a

currency ﬂow to the Ukrainian economy, and

prices of cement as a result increased four-

to ﬁve-fold.

•

Switzerland: In 2015, CRH plc was ﬁned

€32million arising from its involvement in a

price-ﬁxing and market-sharing cartel in

bathroom ﬁxtures and ﬁttings.

• China: In 2014, a Chinese cement company

partly owned by CRH plc was ﬁned €8million

for its participation in a price-ﬁxing cartel.

Its fair to say that on occasion there is no

smoke without ﬁre!

Back to this year’s CRH plc AGM, as I thought

back over my lifetime in the construction

materials sector and visualised my family’s

eradication from the cement/quarry/concrete

sector on four dierent occasions between

1983 and 1994, the eviction of my family from

our home in 1993, the subsequent sheri’s

raids on our home and all the arrest and

imprisonment orders against me from AIB, BOI

and Ulster Bank, our subsequent blacklisting

by Irish banks (with CRH directors on their

boards), and our 27 years before the Courts, I

saw through the opulence of the Carlisle Room

and the expensive suits being modelled

around the top table and realised that the

Maye family has spent our lives and continue

to do so as prisoners of an OCG.

July 2022 41