The High Court has ordered Wesley Curran and Graham O’Donnell to pay Ulster Bank Ireland DAC and the other defendants 50% of the costs of an application to strike out or dismiss their proceedings. The plaintiffs must also pay costs caused by amendments to their pleadings. The costs ruling was delivered by Mr Justice Conor Dignam on 13 January 2025.
The application’s substantive outcome had been set out in an earlier judgment, Curran & O’Donnell v Ulster Bank Ireland DAC & Ors [2023] IEHC 513. The court had found that claims seeking to revisit points raised in earlier 2013 proceedings were an abuse of process and should be dismissed. It also held that a breach of contract claim against the receivers was unsustainable. Other claims, including a conspiracy claim and a breach of duty claim against the receivers, were not dismissed as bound to fail.
The proceedings were stayed pending an appropriate application in the plaintiffs’ English bankruptcies. The court had not dismissed the proceedings on that basis, and the plaintiffs would need relief in England to maintain them.
The defendants argued that they had achieved substantial success: the court barred a significant part of the claims and stayed the proceedings. They sought the costs of the application and, among other things, costs linked to the earlier claims and to the period before the plaintiffs obtained any necessary relief in England. The plaintiffs argued that they should receive their costs, or that costs should be divided, because the defendants had not obtained dismissal of the whole case and had failed on some arguments.
Justice Dignam found that neither side was entirely successful. The defendants had obtained important relief, but the plaintiffs had succeeded in resisting dismissal of parts of their case, and the stay was not the dismissal the defendants had sought. The court also rejected some of the defendants’ arguments, including that the conspiracy claim was barred or bound to fail. It considered those arguments reasonable to raise, and found substantial overlap between the issues, making it impractical to identify the costs attributable to particular unsuccessful points.
Taking a broad approach, the judge awarded the defendants half the costs of the application. He declined to award them the costs of the proceedings to date or the costs up to any relief obtained in England. He also declined to award all costs linked to the earlier claims, but ordered costs caused by amendments to the pleadings because those costs were identifiable and arose directly from claims held to be an abuse of process.
The proposed stay on enforcement of the 50% costs order remains provisional. The judge said either party could make submissions on that point by notifying the registrar within 14 days of delivery of the judgment.