The High Court has approved a settlement between the Official Assignee and Carlow County Council over a road and bridge at Ballinacarrig, finding it a pragmatic way to give effect to a 2005 agreement. In a judgment delivered on 23 June 2023, Mr Justice Mark Sanfey also set the amounts and interest principles governing David Mavroudis’s judgment mortgages and ruled that Mary Keenan’s vendor’s lien ranked ahead of them in a proposed land sale.
The settlement concerns infrastructure built by Samuel Snoddy’s business, USL Homes. The agreement provided for the road and bridge to be transferred to the Council after substantial completion, with development levy credits used to recover construction costs. The Council’s Circuit Court case sought transfer of the property. The Official Assignee agreed the Council held the beneficial interest and asked the High Court to approve a negotiated settlement.
Mavroudis, a secured creditor, opposed the settlement. He argued that the Council owed the estate more than €2.3 million, rather than the payments and credits set out in the agreement. The judge concluded that the 2005 agreement was best read as providing repayment through development levy credits, consistent with the interpretation of the contracting parties and the Official Assignee. He approved the settlement, which provides for €150,000 to the estate and for fixed-credit levy amounts to be remitted as received, subject to the agreement’s terms and cap. The decision approved the compromise; it did not order immediate payment of the full sum Mavroudis claimed.
On the judgment mortgages over folio 1789F, the court directed that the secured amounts comprise €243,087.97, six years’ interest at 8% on €197,632.50 from 1 July 2013, €19,816.61 in agreed legal costs, and 2% interest on the VAT-exclusive portion of those costs from 2 February 2022, less €41,240 in instalments already paid. The parties were directed to agree the resulting total, with liberty to apply if difficulties arose. The court excluded the arbitrator’s later award of arbitration costs from the mortgage security because it post-dated the High Court order giving effect to the earlier award and had not been included in it.
The judgment also addressed the proposed €600,000 sale of land in folio 1789F. Keenan, the registered owner, had agreed to transfer the land under a 2003 contract that required Snoddy to provide her with a house. The judge found that the house formed part of the consideration and that Keenan had established a vendor’s lien. He accepted the negotiated €215,000 as an appropriate amount to discharge it. The lien ranks ahead of Mavroudis’s judgment mortgages, which attach only to the debtor’s interest and are subject to prior rights affecting the land.
The court treated that priority issue as a request for directions under bankruptcy law because it was not properly before it as part of the appeal from the Circuit Court’s sale-approval order. The judgment did not resolve all objections to the sale contract or make final orders on costs. The parties were given three weeks to make written submissions on the orders to follow.