Locations
Following the majority Supreme Court decision in DPP v. JC last year, which relaxed the exclusionary rule in relation the validity of search warrants with technical defects, the High Court has now clarified the extent of documentation that can be seized in the course of an investigation.
On 5 April 2016, Mr Justice Max Barrett ruled that the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (“CCPC”) breached the terms of the warrant it had obtained ahead of a “dawn raid” conducted on an Irish Cement plant in Drogheda by seizing the full email account of Seamus Lynch. The CCPC investigation, which lead to the dawn raid, concerns alleged anti-competitive practices by Irish Cement in the supply of bagged cement. Mr Lynch is the current Chairman of Irish Cement Ltd, part of the CRH Group, an international building materials group with a presence in up to 31 countries.
Judge Barrett reasoned that, as Mr Lynch is also the head of CRH’s business in Ireland and Spain and therefore involved in a number of CRH’s operations other than Irish Cement, his emails would be likely to contain information about CRH’s other businesses that were not relevant to the CCPC’s investigation, as well as private information. Accordingly, he found that the CCPC was not entitled to “trawl” the material it had obtained.
If the CCPC were to review the full extent of the seized emails which were disputed by CRH, he found that it would result in a breach of the Constitution as well as the European Convention on Human Rights.
In light of this ruling, Judge Barrett granted an injunction to CRH, Irish Cement and Mr Lynch which prevents the CCPC from reviewing the full extent of the documentation it had seized, pending an ongoing independent review of the emails to exclude documents that are not relevant to Irish Cement.
In a statement on its website, the CCPC has said it is considering the judgement and its implications carefully as well as the further steps it could take, which presumably includes an appeal. The full text of the CCPC statement is available here.
Author: Brian Ormond