The High Court has ordered the removal of two registered lis pendens notices against Joseph Linders and Patrick Linders, finding they were not properly registered against the brothers personally and that their continued maintenance was not bona fide.
The notices had been registered by Tola Capital Management LLC while it pursued a dispute over a February 2014 option agreement. Tola alleged that the agreement gave it an exclusive option to acquire certain Dublin properties. The defendants said they had terminated the agreement and that their remaining obligation was to pay Tola €500,000. Tola maintained that it could exercise its option under the agreement’s “Method A” structure.
The dispute over the notices was separate from the underlying contractual dispute. The court was considering the defendants’ application to vacate the two registrations, not whether Tola was entitled to acquire the properties under the agreement.
The judgment noted that the agreement contemplated transferring the properties to a new Irish company owned by Tola, rather than to Tola itself. It also recorded that the pleadings and affidavit evidence identified companies, rather than Joseph and Patrick Linders personally, as owners of the relevant properties. The judgment observed that the brothers’ roles as directors and shareholders did not give them a direct proprietary interest in company assets.
The judge concluded that the claim did not meet the statutory requirements for registering a lis pendens against the individual defendants. He also found that, after the plaintiff had been informed that the properties were company-owned and had pleaded that ownership itself, it was not bona fide to continue maintaining the notices against the brothers. The judge said the circumstances gave substance to the defendants’ contention that the registrations were being used to disrupt refinancing arrangements, but the order concerned the notices against the individual defendants.
The court ordered both registrations vacated under section 123(b)(ii) of the Land and Conveyancing Law Reform Act 2009. The judge also said he would have made the same order under the court’s inherent jurisdiction. This ruling did not determine the parties’ underlying contractual claims.