The High Court ordered Tom McEvaddy Property Limited, trading as Nexus Homes and in liquidation, to provide National Asset Loan Management DAC (NAMA) with €185,000 security for costs before pursuing its claim over €228,375.84. The order was made on 25 February 2021 by Mr Justice Twomey.
The company claims NAMA holds the money on trust for it. NAMA denies the claim. In an earlier, “Principal Judgment”, the court had held that the company must provide security and that it had not established a prima facie case. The judge stressed that this was a preliminary assessment: the company may still establish at trial that it owns the money.
NAMA submitted an estimate from costs accountants McCann Sadlier putting its costs of defending the proceedings at €231,140.50, including VAT. The company did not provide a costs estimate of its own. The judge said the court was not bound to accept the sole expert estimate, and treated caution as appropriate when considering evidence obtained by one party. He also accepted sworn evidence that although NAMA is VAT-registered, it cannot recover VAT on its legal fees.
The court set security at 80% of NAMA’s estimate, rounding the result to €185,000 including VAT. In doing so, the judge cited the company’s failure to establish even a prima facie case at the preliminary stage and said full security would otherwise be justified, but discounted the estimate because it was the only expert evidence and setting security was “not an exact science”. The judgment does not state a deadline or payment method for this security in the supplied concluding passage.
Much of the judgment examines the wider cost of civil litigation and the possibility of security for costs against impecunious individual plaintiffs in some circumstances. Those observations were general discussion; this case concerned an insolvent corporate plaintiff. The order fixed security for NAMA’s costs in this case and did not decide the underlying ownership claim.