The Supreme Court has refused Gerard Dowling, Padraig McManus and Piotr Skoczylas leave to appeal a Court of Appeal decision in their case against the Minister for Finance over his shareholding in Permanent TSB Group Holdings. The determination was delivered on 20 April 2015.
The three men are appealing a High Court refusal of an injunction to stop the Minister completing any irreversible disposal of his shareholding. The Minister opposed their application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court. Permanent TSB (Group Holdings) PLC and Permanent TSB were notice parties.
The decision they wanted to challenge was made by Mr Justice Kelly in the Court of Appeal on 19 March 2015. At a directions hearing, he ruled that the second of the two reliefs sought was not urgent enough to need an emergency priority hearing before the company's general meeting on 8 April 2015.
The Supreme Court said it would be reluctant to grant leave to appeal from a directions hearing, because case management is important to the efficient hearing of cases. It would do so in exceptional circumstances only, and it found none here.
The court held that the decision did not involve a matter of general public importance. Nor was an appeal to the Supreme Court necessary in the interests of justice. Leave was therefore not granted.