A FORMER Citroen car dealer has been prosecuted for price fixing by the Competition Authority in a case at Dundalk Circuit Court yesterday.
James Durrigan from Ardee, Co Louth, pleaded guilty on his own behalf and as director of his company James Durrigan and Sons Motors Ltd, Drogheda Road, Ardee, to two counts of entering into an agreement to distort or directly or indirectly fix the price of Citroen cars between June 1997 and February 2002.
Durrigan (62) was given a three-month suspended sentence while the company was fined €12,000. It was revealed a number of similar cases are due before the Central Criminal Court against other motor dealers.
Judge Michael O'Shea was told by prosecuting barrister Paul Anthony McDermott that Durrigan and a number of other dealers were involved with the Citroen Dealers' Association. Minutes of meetings discovered by the Competition Authority showed how dealers, including Durrigan, met in hotels around the country and talked about a number of issues, including price fixing.
Officers from the Competition Authority discovered a pocket-sized laminated card that was devised by the association and given to the dealerships showing the maximum discounts salesmen were allowed to give cash customers.
At one meeting of the association, in Killarney on October 6th, 2001, members were urged to "personalise their price lists and not to be seen to have the same sheet".
Thomas Fitzpatrick, witness for the Competition Authority, explained how prices for extras such as metallic paint were fixed at a certain rate. In the case of the paint, the charge was £250. The minutes of one meeting where the extras were discussed, at a hotel in Navan in 1999, stated that "the agreement was going well".
The delivery charges for new cars were also set by the association and were the same around the country, regardless of where the new motors were being delivered.
Prices were also fixed from time to time on second-hand cars. The authority relied on evidence from around 30 sets of minutes from meetings of the association.
Mr Fitzpatrick said the association had been "put on a more formal footing" in 1995 when it was split into three regions - North and West, Dublin and Leinster and the South.
There was an organised structure to the association and every member paid in €1,000 that would be forfeited in the event they broke any of the price-fixing rules. Periodically, two "mystery shoppers" would go around the association's dealerships and ask about prices on new cars. This was how the agreement were policed.
Durrigan, who lives at Stickillen, Ardee, was president of the association between June 1997 and June 1998. It was an honorary title that rotated around the dealerships every 12 months.
Mr Fitzpatrick, in reply to Jonathan Kilfeather SC for Durrigan, agreed the Ardee dealer saved the Competition Authority time and expense by pleading guilty and said he had co-operated fully with the investigation.
