The High Court has temporarily limited the amount a man must pay each month towards outstanding maintenance while bankruptcy proceedings in his home country progress. The court did not reduce or extinguish the underlying liabilities, and kept his separate obligation to meet vouched medical and dental expenses for his children in place.
In a judgment delivered on 29 December 2023, Mr Justice Max Barrett said the man’s application to vary the maintenance order was premature. The bankruptcy adjudication followed his own referral to an insolvency service and was based on information he supplied, while a trustee was still examining his assets and liabilities. The judge said the man’s financial evidence in the variation application was deficient and difficult to reconcile with his insolvency papers.
The judge had previously found that the man gave patently false evidence in the family proceedings. He also referred to evidence from a forensic accountant about substantial company spending which the judge described as unauthorised personal expenditure. The man’s position, as presented through his counsel, was that the amounts were director loans later added to a loan account. The judge said he was not satisfied that the original judgment was necessarily wrong on that point.
The man’s former spouse opposed the application, citing his failure to comply with maintenance and other court orders, including payments for children’s expenses. She also disputed his account of his finances and said she and the children were staying with her parents after losing their rented home. These were her submissions; the judgment did not determine every disputed allegation raised in the affidavits.
The court suspended the requirement to pay more than €3,000 per month for the period of the bankruptcy process, backdated to its commencement in March 2023, or six months from the judgment, whichever was shorter. The judge said the suspension affected only when the unpaid sums fell due: it did not cancel any outstanding maintenance liability. He said the position would be reconsidered at the end of that period.
The judge also left in force the man’s obligation to pay his fair share of properly vouched medical and dental expenses for the children. He proposed hearing the parties before publishing three judgments in the case and said recordings of hearings could be made available to either party on request, with transcription costs paid by the requester. The judgment records those as proposed steps and further matters for hearing; it does not state that publication or disclosure to authorities had already been ordered.