The High Court has entered judgment for €2,185,204.91 against Parkfly Limited for rent and insurance due under a lease of a car park near Dublin Airport. Mr Justice Quinn ruled that the lease’s turnover formula included the gross revenue collected by Parkfly, even though some of that revenue was later paid to associated companies for shuttle bus services.
The decision, delivered on 15 January 2021, concerned only the landlord’s application for summary judgment on the rent claim. The defendants had already consented to orders for possession. The landlord accepted that his separate claim for mesne rates for occupation after the lease ended would be dealt with at a plenary hearing.
The lease ran from 5 October 2018 to 4 October 2019. It provided for annual base rent of €1.5 million, plus turnover rent calculated under a formula in the lease. Parkfly’s auditor, BDO, certified turnover of €10,249,082 for the nine months and four days to the lease’s end. The landlord’s finance head said the sum claimed comprised €933.25 in rent balance, €2,183,209.52 in turnover rent and €1,062.14 for insurance.
Parkfly’s director, John O’Sullivan, argued that the turnover figure should exclude about 30 per cent of revenue attributed to shuttle bus services provided by Last Bus Limited and its subsidiary, Citi Bus Limited. He said Parkfly had mistakenly included those amounts in turnover and claimed the recalculation would show that it had overpaid. The court noted that customers paid Parkfly, which then paid associated companies for transport services.
The judge found that the lease defined turnover as the gross aggregate of sums received or receivable and expressly covered amounts paid to someone other than the tenant. The definition did not use the separate term “Permitted User”, which described the premises’ use as a car park. The judge concluded that the contract did not allow Parkfly to deduct payments to associated companies from turnover. He also noted that the certified figures had been relied on over several years and that the asserted error was first raised after the proceedings began.
The defendants had sought referral of the dispute to an independent chartered accountant under the lease. The judge acknowledged the general policy of respecting contractual expert-referral clauses but concluded that, in this case, the clause had been invoked to delay payment. He found the proposed defence to be a bare assertion unsupported by the lease wording and granted judgment for the full sum claimed. The court said it would hear the parties on any further directions concerning the mesne-rates claim.