The High Court struck out proceedings brought by John Joseph Dunne against Bank of Ireland, finding that his case against the bank was bound to fail and amounted to an abuse of process.
In an ex tempore judgment delivered on 15 May 2019, Ms Justice Reynolds granted the bank’s application to strike out the proceedings in their entirety as frivolous and vexatious. The court also found that they disclosed no reasonable cause of action against the bank.
The bank submitted that the proceedings had been brought to obstruct the intended sale of lands owned by Dunne’s estranged wife, Jill Rafter, to meet her debts to the bank. The judgment said Rafter was the sole registered owner of the properties, had mortgaged them to the bank, and later defaulted on repayments. The bank had obtained judgment for approximately €1.7 million in 2011 and sought to sell the properties to satisfy the debt.
Dunne accepted that he was not a party to the mortgages and had no banking relationship with the bank. His pleadings sought declarations that the mortgages were unlawful and void, as well as damages for alleged negligence, misrepresentation and collusion.
Justice Reynolds said Dunne had no standing to seek the declarations because he was not a party to a contract with the bank. She found that, without a contractual relationship, the bank owed him no duty of care on which a negligence claim could rest. The judgment said the fraud allegations did not identify or particularise any misrepresentation by the bank, and that collusion was not a valid cause of action. It described the bank’s duty of care as being to Rafter, who supported the application.
The judgment noted that a lis pendens registered against each property had been vacated by an order of Justice Ni Raifteartaigh on 13 June 2018. Dunne appealed that order but later withdrew the appeal. The court also noted that he had taken no substantive step in the proceedings for more than 12 months after delivering his statement of claim, and had filed no replying affidavit to the bank’s application.
Relying on the Supreme Court decision in *Keohane v Hynes* [2014] IESC 66, the High Court concluded that the proceedings were bound to fail and struck them out. The judgment records no further order.