The Court of Appeal found that John and Maria Moore committed civil fraud by recklessly relying on a death certificate that did not belong to their stepmother, Maureen Moore, to register and sell a Dublin home. It left the purchaser’s title intact, however, and dismissed Maureen Moore’s appeal on that issue.
In a judgment delivered on 26 April 2018, Mr Justice Paul Gilligan held that the siblings acted recklessly because, after obtaining the certificate in February 2000, they made no effort to check whether it related to their stepmother. The certificate was for another Maureen Moore, who had lived at 24 Woodleigh Park, Kilmacud. The court said several available avenues of enquiry would have shown it was not their stepmother’s certificate.
The property at 100 Mount Tallant Avenue, Harold’s Cross, had been registered in the joint names of Maureen Moore and her husband, John Moore, the siblings’ father. After his death in 1996, the siblings used the certificate to support their claim that Maureen had died before him and that he had been sole owner. They registered title and sold the property to Nadine Chetty in October 2002.
The siblings said they genuinely believed the certificate was their stepmother’s, citing similarities in age, marital status and occupation, along with earlier efforts to find her. Their father had been described as a widower, and the trial judge accepted that they had made some enquiries about Maureen’s whereabouts. The Court of Appeal said those earlier efforts did not answer the central question: whether they checked the certificate’s identity before relying on it to regularise title and sell the home.
The appeal concerned a 2010 High Court judgment. That court had rejected the siblings’ limitation defence, found no fraud but found mistake, awarded Maureen damages against them, and declined to rectify the register because it considered Chetty a bona fide purchaser without notice. A separate damages hearing resulted in an award of €253,947 against the siblings.
The Court of Appeal said mistake had not been pleaded or argued at trial and that the trial judge had wrongly linked fraud to concealment. Applying the test in Derry v. Peek, it found that the siblings’ conduct amounted to fraud in the civil sense. It declared that they had sold the property by means of fraud.
The court nevertheless upheld the finding that Chetty bought on the open market for full value without notice, so the appeal against her title was dismissed. It also dismissed the appeal over the High Court costs order requiring Maureen to pay Chetty’s costs. Given its fraud finding against the siblings, the court said they must fully indemnify Maureen for those costs.