The High Court has quashed a decision by the Appeals Tribunal of the Chartered Accountants Regulatory Board to dismiss an accountant’s entire disciplinary appeal after refusing an adjournment for one module of the case.
In a judgment delivered on 13 March 2018, Mr Justice Meenan said the tribunal should have considered the serious consequences for Alan Hynes, the applicant, and balanced his request for time to prepare with the tribunal’s interest in dealing with the appeal promptly. The court found there did not appear to have been such a balancing exercise.
The case arose from complaints made in January 2009 about Mr Hynes’s conduct concerning investment schemes and judgments for debts against him. After hearings over 14 days in 2014, the Disciplinary Tribunal upheld a number of serious complaints. In March 2015 it excluded him from membership of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland, reprimanded him and ordered him to pay €500,000 towards the disciplinary hearing costs. He appealed those findings and orders.
The appeal was divided into modules at a case management meeting in January 2016. The first, concerning the TAM Module, was listed for 8 to 10 March. Shortly before the hearing, Mr Hynes’s solicitor withdrew. A solicitor he then consulted said he needed at least a month to prepare after receiving 19 lever-arch folders and later receiving the original hearing transcripts. The tribunal refused his adjournment request.
At the 8 March hearing, counsel for Mr Hynes renewed the request, explaining the volume of material and the limited preparation time. The tribunal refused the adjournment and dismissed the appeal in its entirety under Regulation 35.13.2. The next day it affirmed the Disciplinary Tribunal’s finding and ordered Mr Hynes to pay €150,000 towards appeal costs.
Justice Meenan said the request was confined to the TAM Module, while the other modules had not yet been listed. The tribunal dismissed the whole appeal without inviting submissions on whether it should do so. The court held that the tribunal’s discretion did not remove its duty to act fairly and rationally, and to avoid imperilling a fair hearing or result.
The High Court’s decision concerned the tribunal’s decision-making process, not the underlying disciplinary findings. It quashed the decision dismissing the appeal in its entirety but did not substitute its own decision. The judge said he would hear the parties on consequential orders.