The Court of Appeal has quashed the directed acquittals of F.R. and A.R. on charges of keeping prohibited goods, ruling that evidence obtained during a search under warrant was wrongly excluded. The court said it would hear submissions on whether the respondents should be retried; it did not order a retrial in its judgment.
The respondents had each faced one count under section 102(3)(c) of the Finance Act 1999. A trial judge directed their acquittals on 1 February 2017 after ruling that a search warrant was invalid. The prosecution appealed under section 23 of the Criminal Procedure Act 2010, arguing that the ruling had excluded compelling evidence.
The warrant was issued by the District Court in Drogheda on 23 October 2012, following sworn information from Revenue officer Mary Callan. She said she suspected prohibited goods and records were kept at the respondents’ premises, based on information from a reliable source and her own surveillance. The Court of Appeal’s judgment recounts evidence that she had observed the premises on two occasions and detected a strong smell of diesel near a shed.
A search took place the following morning. Officers found an oil tanker, pumps, hoses, bleaching agent, filters, a 21,000-litre storage tank and sludge in a shed described at trial as the laundry shed. The prosecution said the material was associated with a diesel laundering plant. These were prosecution allegations and evidence; the respondents had pleaded not guilty, and the appeal court did not determine their guilt.
At trial, the respondents argued that Callan had not explained to the District Court judge that the intelligence came through senior management and that she lacked details about its source. The trial judge found the sworn information deficient and the warrant invalid, describing the omission as a systems failure. The prosecution was then unable to offer further evidence, and the judge directed acquittals.
The Court of Appeal disagreed. It held that the warrant application was a distinct procedure from an affidavit in contested litigation, and that hearsay intelligence could support an application. The District Court judge needed to be satisfied that Callan believed the intelligence to be reliable and had reasonable grounds for suspicion; he did not have to establish that the intelligence was true or test its source as if conducting a trial. The court also found that Callan’s personal surveillance provided an additional basis for her suspicion.
The appeal court concluded that the warrant had not been shown to be invalid and that the evidence excluded at trial met the statutory definition of compelling evidence. It allowed the appeal, quashed the acquittals by direction and reserved the question of retrial for further submissions.