The High Court has ordered Catharsis Technologies Limited to provide €134,406 as security for the costs of defending its counterclaim, after an earlier ruling that security should be furnished.
Mr Justice Brian J. McGovern set the amount in a judgment delivered on 28 October 2014. In July, he had ordered security under Order 29 of the Rules of the Superior Courts, having accepted credible evidence that Catharsis Technologies might be unable to pay the counterclaim defendants’ costs if they successfully defended the claim. The October judgment dealt with the amount and the date from which costs should be estimated.
The parties disagreed over whether the usual one-third practice for security against a foreign individual litigant should apply to a foreign corporate body. Catharsis Technologies relied on a prior High Court decision that applied that practice to a foreign company. The counterclaim defendants argued for full security, citing decisions that treated a foreign company in comparable circumstances to an Irish company subject to the Companies Act security regime.
Justice McGovern said the legal position was unclear, but he did not consider the Supreme Court’s decision in Framus to remove the court’s discretion to set security above one-third. He also considered that subsequent Supreme Court authority recognised that discretion. Given that security had been ordered on the basis of Catharsis Technologies’ potential inability to pay, he saw no good reason to treat it differently from an Irish company in similar circumstances. He therefore set security at the full estimated amount.
The estimate covers a four-day hearing related to the counterclaim. It includes solicitors’ and counsel fees, stenographers, electronic discovery, witnesses’ expenses and an allowance for VAT, which the judge said was uncertain. The court calculated the total at €134,406.
The judge set 1 May 2014, when a counterclaim defendant first requested security, as the date from which the costs were to be estimated. The order fixes security for the counterclaim defendants’ costs; the judgment does not determine the underlying counterclaim.