Agenda: From having its registered headquarters used to run an unlicensed banking operation to being fined for involvement in price-fixing cartels, CRH has rarely been out of the news, writes Dominic Coyle.

CRH, which started life as a merger between Irish Cement and Roadstone in the 1970s, saw profits top the €1 billion mark for the first time last year.

The success of what has been for some time Ireland's largest industrial group has been built on an aggressive policy of expansion in key markets - notably the United States and mainland Europe - generally through a series of bolt-on acquisitions to substantial initial purchase into a market. The company routinely spends in excess of €1 billion a year extending its reach in existing markets.

Sustained economic growth in Ireland and the United States has seen it prosper in recent years and it has been building up a significant presence in eastern Europe, which is largely seen as due for a boom in infrastructural spending on the back of entry by many states in the region to the European Union.

However, CRH is no stranger to controversy.

Only last year, Swiss competition authorities opened an investigation into price fixing by its local subsidiary Jura Holdings, with another Swiss group, in relation to cement supplied for a large rail-tunnel project.

The company has several times fallen foul of competition authorities.

In 1994, the European Commission ruled that its Irish Cement subsidiary had been part of an EU-wide cartel involved in fixing prices and imposed a fine. Two years later, UK authorities fined it, along with rival Quinn Group and others, for similar activities between 1985 and 1992 in Northern Ireland.

Its image has also been tarnished by headlines over illegal dumping on land it owns in Wicklow in recent years, although the company has always insisted it knew nothing about such practices at three CRH sites. A Garda investigation into the illegal dumping is still ongoing.

However, its darkest hour was the revelation that former chairman Des Traynor used its offices to run an unlicensed banking operation in the 1980s. In an affidavit to the High Court in 1999, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment suggested that a substantial number of the company's directors knew its premises were being used to house the operation - known as the Ansbacher Deposits - which was designed to defraud the Revenue Commissioners.

It emerged that more than half the 15-strong board of CRH back in 1987 had held money in Ansbacher accounts.

Detailed efforts were made by Mr Traynor and those he worked with to ensure there would be no trail for the Revenue to follow. The hot money invested by some of the State's wealthiest individuals was routed offshore but was accessible to clients in two Irish banks - Guinness Mahon, of which Mr Traynor was deputy chairman for many years, and Irish Intercontinental Bank.

Mr Traynor set up the Ansbacher scheme in the 1970s and managed it for 20 years. Money from the deposits was used to fund the lifestyle of former taoiseach Charles Haughey and provide security on loans for others within a close circle.

When it was disclosed Traynor had been operating the bank from CRH's headquarters, the company swiftly denied any knowledge of what had gone on and said the actions of individual directors who had invested in Ansbacher was a matter for themselves.