The High Court clarified the terms of a stay on enforcement of an Italian judgment and awarded Mares Associates Limited the costs of its stay application, in a supplemental ruling delivered on 1 June 2017.
Ms Justice Baker said the stay applied to further enforcement proceedings in Ireland while an appeal against the underlying order remained before the Italian court. It would last until further order of the Italian court or the Irish Court of Appeal. The judge said the stay had been granted under Article 46(1) of Council Regulation 44/2001, which permits an enforcing court to stay proceedings where an ordinary appeal has been lodged in the state where the judgment originated.
The ruling supplements a judgment delivered on 23 February 2017. In that earlier decision, the court found that Mares had a valid appeal in Italy and granted a stay of enforcement. The supplemental judgment addressed disagreement about the wording of the order, whether an appeal could be brought to the Court of Appeal, and costs.
Haier European Trading SRL had argued for an approach that would have stayed the appeal against the Irish enforcement order. Justice Baker rejected that position, explaining that the application she had decided concerned a stay of further enforcement, rather than a stay of the appeal from the Master of the High Court’s order. She said the stay rested on prejudice and the interests of justice, including the need to avoid enforcing an order while it was under appeal in its state of origin.
On appeal rights, the judge said the determination that Mares’s appeal was in time was a question of law and, in her view, could be appealed to the Court of Appeal. She added that the Court of Appeal could decide otherwise. The judgment did not decide the substance of any such appeal.
Justice Baker said Mares had succeeded in obtaining the stay and should receive its costs of that application. She declined to stay enforcement of the costs award pending the Italian appeal, saying there was no information about when that appeal would be decided and an indefinite stay would not serve the interests of justice. Any further stay of the costs award pending an appeal to the Court of Appeal was a matter for that court.