The High Court has ordered Michael Wymes to pay Thomas J. Roche €1,707,119 after finding that Roche’s settlements of two bank debts benefited Wymes, a co-guarantor of loans to the former mining company Bula Ltd.
In a judgment dated 8 May 2008, Mr Justice John MacMenamin awarded €1,831,500 for the National Irish Bank (NIB) debt, then deducted €124,381 to account for Wymes’s overpayment on the separate Ulster Bank debt. The judge said he would hear counsel on the form of the order.
Bula’s four guarantors were Roche, his late father Thomas C. Roche, Wymes and Richard Wood. After Bula defaulted, judgments were entered against the guarantors for debts owed to the banks. In 2004, Roche and his father’s estate paid €9 million to NIB and €1.4 million to Ulster to settle their own liabilities. The agreements expressly reserved the banks’ rights against other parties.
The judge found that the NIB payment was appropriated to the guarantors’ common debt and extinguished Wymes’s liability to that bank. He relied in part on Wymes’s later use of the Roche payment to support the removal of a judgment charge over his lands. The court rejected Wymes’s account that he had been unaware of the payment’s effect.
The evidence did not allow the court to reconcile all the NIB debt calculations. It therefore used €7.326 million—the amount Wymes could have been required to pay—as the common liability and divided it equally among the four guarantors. The court found Roche entitled to €1,831,500 in contribution.
For Ulster, the court found the €1.4 million settlement reduced the balance claimed against Wymes and Wood. Wymes later paid Ulster €589,841.84. The judge treated the total debt as €1,989,841.84 and calculated Wymes’s one-quarter share at about €495,460. Because his payment exceeded that share, he received a €124,381 allowance against Roche’s contribution claim.
The judgment rejected Wymes’s proposed credits for several earlier payments, finding the evidence did not establish that they reduced his personal guarantee liability. It also rejected his claims concerning proceeds from shares held by Wood’s company and Roche’s settlement of a separate negligence claim. The court made no finding that either bank’s settlements released Wymes under their written terms; it based contribution on the benefits Wymes received from the payments.