The High Court has ruled that, under the amended Order 8 of the Rules of the Superior Courts, a court may renew a summons on only one occasion.
Mr Justice Meenan delivered the judgment on 22 November 2019 in proceedings brought by Noel Murphy and Jean Cullen against A.R.F. Management Limited and five other defendants. The plaintiffs allege that the company and/or its former directors misappropriated €3,376,255. They seek damages for claims including fraud, deceit, breach of fiduciary duty, breach of contract and negligence. Those claims were not determined in this judgment.
The plenary summons was issued on 28 April 2017. It was renewed for six months in October 2018 under the earlier version of Order 8. In April 2019 it was renewed for a further three months to allow the plaintiffs to seek service abroad on a director defendant residing in the Russian Federation. In July 2019, the court granted another three-month renewal, citing complexities and delays in serving defendants outside the jurisdiction. A further order in October 2019 allowed time for legal submissions on the effect of the rule change.
The amended Order 8 took effect on 11 January 2019. It reduced the renewal period from six months to three and required the court to be satisfied that “special circumstances” justified an extension. The earlier rule expressly allowed renewals “from time to time during the currency of the renewed summons”; that wording was removed.
The plaintiffs’ counsel argued that if the amended rule were meant to permit only one renewal, it would say so expressly. The judge concluded that the deleted wording had enabled multiple renewals and that its absence meant a second or later renewal was no longer permitted. He also considered the amended rule’s reference to “a renewal” consistent with that reading.
The court’s conclusion concerned the meaning of the amended rule: a court can renew a summons once, but cannot order a further renewal after it has already been renewed. The judgment did not decide the underlying misappropriation allegations or set out a new order concerning the plaintiffs’ claims.