The High Court has declined Deirdre Dennis’s application to annul her bankruptcy, which had been automatically discharged in October 2018, after she argued that a bank’s later admission of a mortgage error showed she would not otherwise have sought bankruptcy.
In a judgment delivered on 19 May 2020, Ms Justice Pilkington refused the requests to annul the adjudication under section 85C of the Bankruptcy Act 1988 or under the court’s inherent jurisdiction. She made no order on Ms Dennis’s requests for the production of documents and for property vested in the Official Assignee to be returned. The judge said she would hear the parties on any consequential orders, including costs.
Ms Dennis had applied to be adjudicated bankrupt herself, and was adjudicated on 23 October 2017. Her bankruptcy automatically ended a year later. The Insolvency Service of Ireland sent her a certificate of discharge in January 2019.
The application followed a 1 February 2019 letter from Bank of Ireland Mortgages. The bank said it had failed to provide a tracker rate when the contract entitled Ms Dennis to one, apologised, and accepted that the failure had been a factor in her losing ownership of her home in Killala, Co Mayo. It said it had withdrawn its bankruptcy claim for the remaining mortgage balances and notified the Official Assignee about redress and compensation for the estate.
The Official Assignee told Ms Dennis’s solicitors that €60,672.72 was claimed from the redress for other creditors, AIB and the Revenue Commissioners. The estate had made no distribution at that point. The judge recorded that Ms Dennis accepted during the application that the money could be used to discharge those creditors.
Ms Dennis argued that, without the mortgage error and the related financial difficulties, she would not have felt compelled to surrender her home and seek self-adjudication. The judge acknowledged her distress and accepted her evidence that she likely would not have considered bankruptcy if the indebtedness had not existed as she understood it.
But the judge said the circumstances prompting the application arose outside the bankruptcy process and were confirmed by the bank after the discharge. She found no fraud or abuse of the bankruptcy process. She also noted that section 135 prevents review, rescission or variation of an order of discharge, and said she could see no way to annul a bankruptcy that had already been discharged.
The judgment said any redress Ms Dennis might pursue over the matters described lay elsewhere. The court did not decide what that redress might be.