A retired motor industry executive has taken High Court proceedings aimed at preventing his trial for alleged price fixing on grounds that his right to a fair trial was prejudiced by an RTÉ Prime Time programme which involved a "dress rehearsal" of the case against him.
John McGlynn (68), Cypress Grove South, Templeogue, Dublin, is facing trial next March on six charges of aiding and abetting members of the Citroen Dealers Association to fix car prices between 1998 and 2003.
He has denied the charges and claims he will be unable to obtain a fair trial due to the "deeply prejudicial" nature of the December 2005 Prime Time programme which dealt with a major Competition Authority investigation into price fixing in the motor trade.
Yesterday in the High Court, Mr Justice Michael Peart granted leave to Hugh Mohan SC, for Mr McGlynn, leave to apply for a stay on the trial pending the outcome of his judicial review proceedings aimed at securing an order prohibiting the DPP from going ahead with the trial in the Central Criminal Court.
In an affidavit, Mr McGlynn said he retired in 1995 as a motor industrial sales and marketing director and he continued to work on a consultancy basis post-retirement.
The first he knew of an investigation by the Competition Authority (CA) was in November 2003 when his distraught wife called him to say officers from the authority and gardaí were searching his home, he said.
Last year, he was served with a book of evidence and it transpired that other people who had worked in the industry with him have been granted qualified immunity from prosecution on the basis that they testify against him, he said.
He said his right to a fair trial was prejudiced by a delay in taking the case but more so by the "invidious and damaging" publicity in the Prime Time programme. The programme was "in effect a dress rehearsal for the prosecution case in the forthcoming trial in the Central Criminal Court".
Mr McGlynn said the programme was "seriously unbalanced" and "one sided" and featured comments from an officer in the cartels division of the Competition Authority along with a number of senior economists, a politician and a senior lawyer whose contributions were "edited in such a fashion as to present as coherent and damning a case as possible" in support of the prosecution against him. He said he was filmed and spoken to, but not voluntarily, in the programme, was identified in a very public fashion and "unambiguously accused of the most serious offences." He said the Prime Time programme meant the allegations against him had acquired a degree of notoriety which has allowed them to persist in the public mind to an unusual extent.
It was compounded by an RTÉ radio broadcast the day after the programme in which the same Competition Authority officer was interviewed and which was again prejudicial, he says.
Mr McGlynn said he is aware that, in other cases where there has been adverse publicity, a court may allow a time to elapse prior to a trial to allow the effects of the publicity to fade. He did not believe this approach was appropriate in his case because there has already been a delay in bringing criminal charges on top of a "detailed, deliberate and calculated presentation of what is effectively the prosecution case" by the national broadcaster. He believed the publicity had "taken root" in the public mind.