The High Court has refused Anne Kelly’s application to stop Gerard Murphy from progressing a winding-up petition and to set aside earlier orders concerning the liquidation of Kelly Trucks Limited.
In a judgment delivered on 17 July 2020, Mr Justice Brian O’Moore refused all relief sought in Kelly’s motion. The application had been heard in February, before a petition seeking to wind up Kelly Trucks Strokestown DAC could be considered. Murphy brought that petition, relying on a 2019 High Court order directing the company to pay €172,820.64. The judge said that order had not been stayed or appealed by the company, and that none of the ordered sums had been paid.
Kelly alleged that fraud had affected orders removing Nehaal Singh as liquidator and appointing Murphy, and the later correction of those orders. She asked the court to restrain Murphy from progressing the petition and acting as liquidator, and to set aside orders made in 2015 and 2019. The judge treated these as allegations, not established facts.
The court refused an interlocutory injunction because Kelly had not established a fair issue to be tried or shown that damages would be inadequate. O’Moore said stopping Murphy from continuing the liquidation would halt it, while Kelly had not shown what harm she would suffer. She had also offered no undertaking to compensate for harm caused by an injunction.
The judge separately refused to set aside the earlier orders. He said Kelly had raised materially the same challenges before High Court judges in 2019, without success, and could not use the current application to reopen those decisions. He also relied on the rule against raising issues that could and should have been brought in earlier proceedings.
There was a further procedural obstacle: the application had not been served on Costello Transport Limited, and Singh had not been joined as a notice party, despite the potential effect on his former position as liquidator. The judge considered that failure fatal to the application.
For completeness, O’Moore also considered the substance of the allegations and found they were not established. He referred to the 2015 correction in which Baker J. said she had intended to make an order under section 277 of the Companies Act. The court’s refusal did not determine the winding-up petition itself; the judgment addressed Kelly’s interlocutory and set-aside requests.