The High Court has dismissed Roseann McLaughlin’s application to show cause against her adjudication in bankruptcy, leaving the adjudication in place. The application was heard on 26 April 2021. The court did not make a new bankruptcy adjudication in this judgment; it dismissed the challenge to the adjudication made on 11 February 2021.
Pepper Finance Corporation (Ireland) DAC petitioned for Ms McLaughlin’s bankruptcy. The judgment records that in 2013 the High Court entered judgment against Ms McLaughlin and her husband for €4,022,734.92, and that the Supreme Court dismissed their appeal in 2015. Ms McLaughlin later acknowledged the debt in a personal insolvency application and undertook through solicitors to discontinue separate proceedings brought in 2016 against the transferee of the loan facilities.
In seeking to set aside the adjudication, Ms McLaughlin argued that the debt was not a liquidated sum because a receiver had not completed the receivership. The court said this confused enforcement with liability, which had been settled by the Supreme Court judgment. It also rejected the argument that the 2016 proceedings raised an issue for trial, citing the prior finding that Ms McLaughlin could not rely on proceedings she had undertaken to withdraw and that no valid issue for trial had been identified.
The court rejected her complaint that she had not received personal notice of the final adjourned hearing date. It noted that she had been served with the petition, had not appeared, and had received notice that a February listing would be used to assign a new hearing date. The judge found no injustice from the absence of direct personal notice of the later date, and said a party could waive the right to participate through inaction. The judgment also said that lack of notice alone would not justify the application without an actual defence to the petition.
The court dismissed a complaint that the petitioning creditor relied on a booklet of papers not supplied to Ms McLaughlin, noting she had not appeared and that the papers were her own. It also rejected as unsupported the claim that the petition was brought for the collateral purpose of nullifying the 2016 proceedings. The application to show cause against the bankruptcy adjudication was dismissed.