Great news guys. Now get onto Hireland and pledge and give a few jobs.

Much of these profits have been made on the back of an illegal price-fixing cartel operating in the.concrete and cement industries. Ongoing legal actions taken by Framus Ltd and Goode Concrete serve to demonstrate the extent of the crippling stranglehold CRH have over many small businesses in this country. Compounding this is the negligence of the Competition Authority who steadfastly refuse to investigate the industry despite the severity of the allegations laid at the door of CRH. The term Regulatory Capture comes to mind here.

CRH operate a cartel with others in the cement, concrete and tarmac markets in Ireland. They have been selling concrete below average variable cost in the Dublin concrete market and abused their dominant position in their upstream cement and aggregates markets by doing so. This is illegal and criminal but they are being protected by the successive Governments due to a term called political and regulatory capture.
CRH has been found to have operated a price fixing cartel in Northern Ireland between 1985 and 1992. CRH was fined by the European Commission in 1994 for conducting a pan European cartel. In 2007 CRH was fined €530,000 for obstructing an antitrust investigation and destroying evidence. In 2009 CRH was fined €25 million for participation in a price fixing cartel in Poland.
CRH is doing monumental damage to the Irish economy by overcharging for cement and tarmac and using this money to subsidise a corporate eviction strategy which is costing the economy jobs.

They are obviously working in a very challenging environment and there is still some way to go before new jobs will emerge. A profit of less than 4% on sales suggest that further cost cutting will be needed to remain competitive.

‘Very challenging environment’ indeed. It’s a tough business building apartheid cement walls around Palestine, but some Irish firm has got to do it.

http://www.ipsc.ie/campaigns/crh-divest/petition