The High Court has set aside a protection order obtained by a debtor identified as P A. D after finding that her insolvency arrangement did not come within the European rules relied upon to bring the case in Ireland.
The protection order had been made on 24 November 2010. Anglo Irish Bank Corporation (International) plc later challenged the court's jurisdiction.
The first issue was whether the proposal was a "vesting arrangement". Under the Bankruptcy Act 1988, that means an arrangement in which all or part of the debtor's own property is vested in the Official Assignee for realisation and distribution to creditors.
At a creditors' meeting in January 2011, the debtor proposed making €615,923 available, leaving €591,286.08 after Official Assignee costs and producing a dividend of less than eight cent in the euro. That proposal did not involve any vesting of her property.
Shortly before the jurisdiction hearing, a revised proposal suggested vesting an Irish Government bond. However, the bond belonged to two third parties. Ms Justice Dunne held that this was not merely a modification of the earlier proposal but a fundamentally different arrangement, and in any event did not meet the statutory requirement because the asset was not the debtor's property.
The court separately considered where the debtor's centre of main interests, or COMI, was located. That test looks to the place where a debtor regularly administers her interests in a way ascertainable by creditors.
The judgment recorded that she had lived and worked in the Isle of Man from 1989, described her home there as her family home and remained tax-resident there until enforcement action caused her to leave in July 2010. She then lived in Northern Ireland before taking a Dublin lease on 1 July 2011, shortly before the hearing.
The court found that this recent move lacked the permanence needed to establish an Irish COMI. It therefore held that Ireland lacked jurisdiction and set aside the protection order.