The Supreme Court allowed Anthony Karl Frank Baird Hilton’s appeal against a High Court order for his rendition to England, concluding that no Irish common-law offence of cheating the public revenue existed for the purpose of the corresponding-offence issue before it.
The judgment, delivered by Denham J. on 30 July 2004, concerned an appeal from an order made by Peart J. in the High Court on 13 January 2004. The warrant stated that Hilton had been indicted at Southampton Crown Court for allegedly cheating the public revenue and had failed to surrender to custody after being released on bail. The allegations in the warrant were not findings by the Supreme Court.
The warrant alleged that, between January 1991 and June 2001, Hilton failed to pay VAT, PAYE contributions and National Insurance contributions while acting as a director of several companies and as a sole proprietor. It alleged that he allowed companies to trade despite being unable to pay debts, set up companies to defraud the Crown, delayed tax returns, manipulated VAT returns, failed to pay debts despite having funds, and personally benefited from company assets.
The appeal raised two issues: whether the alleged conduct corresponded to an offence in Ireland, and whether the exception for cheating the public revenue in the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001 preserved such an offence. The judgment’s conclusion on the corresponding-offence ground was that the Irish common-law offence did not exist.
Denham J. reviewed historical and legal materials, including the absence of Irish prosecutions or judicial decisions on the offence in the preceding century, and the modern use of statutory offences for tax cheating. The judgment said the 2001 Act’s exception to abolition of common-law cheating did not create or revive an offence. It also found that the supposed offence’s elements were too uncertain to satisfy the requirement that criminal law be clear.
The court therefore allowed the appeal on the corresponding-offence ground. The supplied judgment extract does not state the court’s disposition of the separate argument about the revenue-offence exception, or set out any further order beyond allowing the appeal on this ground.