Lessons in Leprechaun Law
[The judgments can be accessed through courts.ie Click on Find a Judgment, put in Dully and pick one]
The Court of Appeal judgment in this case was dropped on December 17th. It is a shameful thing. It is also more than a little sad, at least for the beneficiaries. The beneficiaries in these rigged cases are already deprived of the relief and exultation which go with winning in what should be close to life threatening circumstances. With this one, they are deprived as well of the communal duper's delight which normally bonds them, because they're not fooling anyone.
I used to believe that as long as we kept plugging away, we would reach a point past which (past the suppression of evidence, planting of documents, losing of witnesses, embezzlement of security, tricks with procedure, tricks of presentation, endless lies) the judges would be forced to step in order to protect the integrity of the institutional court ............. oh dear.
A sure fire way of determining if a lawyer or judge is being honest in the presentation of this case is whether they try to obfuscate the fact that there are two clubs involved - Athlone Town Association Football Club, with which our company has four contracts and I have two, and Athlone Town Athletic Football Club, which remains a mystery to us and to the courts. In para 4, Judges Collins, Faherty and Murray do the FAI thing. They use a name that straddles both clubs, which can only be being done as a favour (as is the FAI's refusal again this year to reveal the identity of the Athlone club that plays in their league). Para 29 goes on to describe Judge Humphreys' Fifth Judgment ordering that E160,673 be held for ''the members of the Club'', not for the members of the (probably Pre Season majority owned) Athlone Town Athletic FC that Humphreys favoured.
The three judges take it one step further than even Judge Humphreys dared at para 10, by calling the private company that is the corporate name of Messrs. O'Connor, Hayden and Dully (and most certainly was not formed by the club) ''Athlone Town AFC'' - a collection of words and letters which was widely used by the opposition throughout the proceedings in order to (again) straddle both clubs. This reminds me of the brain melting conundrum of the Holy Trinity, with which our little Catholic heads once had to contend. They are three separate entities but they are somehow one.
The early paragraphs are full of basic factual 'errors'. The judges would know this, having read the unchallenged March 2019 affidavits of Tom Burke, John Comber, Philip O'Farrell and Cieran Temple which set out the basic facts of the case for the first time.
I'll skip ahead to the preliminary appeal. The cherry-picking agenda of the judges is plain to see in Para 60, where they manage to leave out Mr. McCaul's false claim (which falseness, also found in Mr. MacGeehin's November 7th 2019 affidavit, even Judge Humphreys accepted - though he went on to make the Jesuitical 'compromise' that there didn't have to be a physical meeting for there to have been a meeting) of a meeting on May 23rd 2019 by replacing the words ''The directors held their own meeting outside Court, without the presence of Solicitor and Counsel, to discuss and decide on these terms'' with ''...''
Para 68 deals with more than two full days of cross-examinations with the line ''The hearing days of 29 November to 4 December were largely taken up with the cross-examination of Mr. McNelis, Mr. Molloy, Mr. McCaul and Mr. MacGeehin on their respective affidavits''. And that's it. Not one quote or direct reference from the cross-examinations appears in the 139 page judgment. The judges clearly felt that they had no option but to go with a scorched earth policy of evidence shredding in order to protect their friends' interests. If I recall correctly, something similar happened on July 17th 2020, when Judge Caroline Costello and the three counsel pretended that the four affidavits of Messrs. Dully, McCaul, Mac Aodhain and Molloy no longer existed [surprisingly, counsel for Garda Dully 'revived' some of the latter affidavit at the November 2020 hearings, questioning the authenticity of our minutes filed under Exhibit DRM1 while claiming that our constitution (Exhibit DMR4) was not exhibited at all]. I'm struggling not to use the term 'kangaroo court' to cover this kind of thing. It seems a little too obvious somehow, especially with all the Sinn Fein guys involved. Paul Krugman coined the term 'Leprechaun Economics' to cover some of the hoops we Irish jump through in order to please the Tim Cooks of this world. So I think I will run with 'Leprechaun Law'. How does that sound?
Room ... sorry, para 101 records that the written submissions for the December 2019 hearings include an accusation (about which we were not consulted) of fraudulent distribution against Messrs. Temple and McCaul. They may be flunkies, eager to please the professionals, but they are not crooks. They are the biggest victims in the whole debacle, because they chose to neglect their fiduciary duties to our company for nothing more than a ''Good man yourself'' from Mr. Delaney. Mr. Forde's accusation was withdrawn amid much hissy fittery in court, but the judges point out that it ''re-appeared in the submissions delivered for the purposes of this appeal'' - which is a revealing cameo of how the game is played. Those submissions were drafted by Mr. Forde and filed by Mr. McNelis after the two men were fired by our company - before (I thought) they could do any more harm to our case. My only two achievements with our legal teams have been to get Cormac O Dulachain SC to submit most of our evidence in March 2019 and to corral most of Forde's talents into arguing our position at the December 2019 hearings.
Among Mr. Forde's oral submissions was the unanswerable (effectively proven as such through being ignored in the judgments) point that the 'agreement' was a prohibited distribution (and a de facto liquidation), or as he put it to a judge who wanted him to go the 'fraud' route - ''I'm not saying fraudulent, I'm saying this is a prohibited distribution''. And ''...one cannot distribute to the shareholders any property of the company in cash or in kind, including a contribution to the settlement of claims against them personally, it's simply prohibited''. Neither of the judgments has mentioned these submissions. It is important to be precise about what the judges are attempting to do here. Dealing with the accusation of fraudulent distribution alone is an attempt at misdirection away from a point that is much stronger.
Mr. MacGeehin's little December 5th 2019 affidavit is the gift that keeps on giving. Para 146 says ''On (3 December) Mr. McGeehin swore a further affidavit. It purports to have been filed on 5 December.'' It then says that it ''was not given to counsel for the Company until shortly after lunch'' (during which lunch break, incidentally, Garda Dully's solicitor Richard Stapleton joked ''The judgment is already written'') on December 4th. While para 146 mentions Stapleton Solicitors, it does not mention the unacceptable fact that the affidavit was witnessed by Mr. Stapleton himself. Nor does it question why that would happen. And no mention is made of the many confusing statements made to the court by Mr. O Dulachain on December 4th about the affidavit, such as ''It has now been stamped'', ''There'll be unsworn copies'' and (when asked by the judge if it had ''been filed yet'') ''No, the stamp office is closed'', ''It's quite difficult'' and ''I will undertake to file it''. Judge Humphreys later said ''Mr. MacGeehin was on his way to the central office to file it and found he couldn't because of the hours it was open'' - an unlikely position for an experienced solicitor to find himself in and not something that was ever said to the court.
Going back to the second quote above, the judges show no concern for the accepted procedure for delivery of an affidavit, which in this case would have been to give a copy to each of Mr. Stapleton (for Garda Dully), Mr. McNelis (for our company) and to me (for myself) - none of which happened. Mr. O Dulachain said ''I have the original in my hand here'', Mr. MacGeehin took it from him and made to give it to me, Mr. Forde intercepted and passed it through the Registrar to the Judge. I have no idea if it was sworn at that stage. Or stamped; I know of no honest reason why an affidavit would be stamped and not filed at the same time, though it happened (for obvious and dishonest reasons) with my April 12th 2018 affidavit. Going back to the first quote above, this is another attempt at misdirection. The questioning that should have applied to its swearing (the affidavit was almost certainly backdated) is instead switched to its filing. The staff of the central office (whom I've always found to be courteous, efficient and annoyingly strict i.e. everything they should be) are to some extent thrown under the bus in order to facilitate this manoeuvre. If nothing else, it just shows a lack of basic manners.
Para 153 refers to ''a letter dated 27 June from Mr. Temple to Mr. MacGeehin''. Para 107 references an affidavit I had filed in order to mark the judges' cards, just in case our legal people refused to do anything - as we've come to expect. The affidavit included a verbatim (from Mr. Temple) account of how the letter was drafted for him by Mr. MacGeehin and presented to him some days later by Mr. McCaul for signing. But the judges are preferring here to pretend that the letter is authentic i.e. that Mr. Temple doesn't know how to spell his own name. (In purporting to quote the entire letter, the judges manage to leave out the name and also the writing of ''Date'' before the date - oh look, it's June 27th, not July at all!).
The only indemnity I know of in this case is a clause in a purported Deed of Trust written by club chairman John Hayden. Yet para 164 refers to ''Mr. Molloy's indemnity'', even though the document relates to the club and our company only. The indemnity has had zero relevance to the case since the FAI stopped negotiating with us nearly five years ago. But the judges persist with the notion that I am trying to shake down the club members for money, the members of a club which no longer exists.
I need to clear my name. For the record, I am coming from a place where not so long ago, I'd sometimes feign injury when I couldn't raise the seven euro or so for a weekly game of five-a-side football. I came into money via the Celtic Tiger. Not having any interest in holding on to what would be better used in making the world around me operate more efficiently, I invested huge sums of it in charities and projects around the country. In Athlone, I invested two thirds of a million euro in the stadium to stop it falling into private (banking) hands. I invested E75,000 in the club that played there, E10,000 in Athlone Boxing Club and E60,000 in South Westmeath Hospice.
As a result of these investments, I have been slandered and humiliated in courts. I've had to watch my parents made distraught in their final years. My father would say ''They're going to take everything from us''.
I live in a house valued at E205,000. I drive a car that cost me E19,000. I had my last holiday nine years ago. My income is variable, but it would average at in or around E20,000 per annum. I don't sleep much; the responsibility of having to protect the stadium for the people of Athlone, the fear of losing it, is a big weight to carry.
Para 174 correctly describes as ''striking'' that ''at no point were the constitutional documents of the company put before the High Court''. My fight to get basic evidence and key witnesses into court is well documented, as is especially our first legal team's determination to keep them out. There is nothing as basic as a company's constitution in a company law case. But its absence cuts both ways. When did a judgment (before this, which aspires to being the last) mention it? When did a judge ask 'why is this being hidden from me?' The reason is, I think, simple. We are a charitable purposes company which holds the property in trust for the people of Athlone and whose directors are prohibited from receiving payments. In other words, all talk of other trusts and my criminal greed falls away when the constitution is read. Therefore, the documents had to be kept out of court and opposition lawyers and judges had to keep schtum lest they got what they asked for. The judges' determination to not read our ''constitutional documents'' reaches its nadir at para 174, when they say ''They were not furnished to this Court either''. This is a lie. They were exhibited with my July 16th 2020 affidavit.
Para 178 says ''...there is no question but that a majority of the Board of the Company determined to settle the proceedings on the terms embodied in the statement furnished to the Court on May 28 (sic)'', which is nonsense. The cross-examination evidence shows that not one member of the Board agreed to those terms. But, of course, that cross-examination evidence has been memory holed.
Paras 191 and 192 say 'Gotcha!' and hope we will buy that, because Garda Dully was not cross-examined in December 2019. This shows either a charming faith in the cross-examination process or a gross hypocrisy. Dully's confusingly phrased but unchallenged statement claims that all of the directors and shareholders supported the 'agreement'. This is fine, as far as it goes. But it goes nowhere, because all the legal people accepted on May 23rd 2019 that I was not involved in any way. In saying that I was, the judges are contradicting the DAR-informed para 8 (iii) of the October 15th (Sixth) Judgment of Judge Humphreys, which clearly records that the Court was told that only Messrs. Temple and McCaul were on board with the 'agreement'.
Judges Collins, Faherty and Murray are disingenuously selective in recording the contents of the Sixth Judgment at para 55. The preceding paragraph ends with ''... the judge rose to listen to the Digital Audio Recording of the proceedings'' but doesn't say why (because he heard what none of the judges wanted to hear?). They later play the ingenue in trying to squirm their way out of the danger of being seen to tell a lie by omission (which is a crime in certain circumstances). Para 201 says ''...it is puzzling that the agreement was presented to the Court in a manner that suggested that all parties to the action had consented to it''. This is embarrassing. And para 55 fails to mention para 8 (iv) of the Sixth Judgment, which also brings the DAR into play to dismiss an order which was obviously designed to scare us into surrendering the appeals (raising the obvious question of who or what persuaded the Registrar Ms. Evans to write the 'order' in the first place). Like just about everything connected with barristers and judges at the business end of this case, it involves a concealed trick or illegality which they are hoping we either don't notice or are not able to understand.
Paras 195 to 198 deal with Mr. McNelis' secret (from his client) May 15th 2019 email to his friend Mr. MacGeehin. It's not an issue I am interested in, as it can be argued in many different directions i.e. it is a barrister trap intended to lure us down yet another blind alley, where we invariably get clobbered with a baseball bat.
The same two gentlemen's siphoning of our E50,000 security for costs on behalf of Garda Dully gets a fancy Latin opt out in para 199 - nihil ad rem. Now, I don't want to disparage the accountant's office staff, but I know that heads would roll had one tenth of that money gone missing from an account at Headford Co-operative Mart. Being duped is not a crime. But being duped out of someone else's money must be something.
Now that the other directors are out of the way, job done (up to a point), the barristers can put their energies into taking me for everything I own. That scene was set in May 2017, when I stupidly told FAI CEO John Delaney that I was willing to sell my farm if that was what it took to win in the High Court. The second, third and fourth questions I was asked under cross-examination in April 2018 were all about farming, including (of course) how-many-acres.
Para 202 cranks the process towards the big pay-off. Para 209 reveals some of the in-house mechanics, that when a counsel argues something that the judge doesn't like to hear, then his client gets charged extra for that. Which is nice. And this can come from a counsel who apparently has carte blanche from the Gardai to throw a case if he feels like it. In other works, a total racket.
Para 214 moves things on to Mr. Temple's successful appeal against costs. This could easily have gone the other way. Given the amount of shit that I've got from stuff the boys had to make up, I shudder to think what would have happened had I gone the Temple route of taking action to challenge the barristers' 'agreement' and then not bothering to show up in court. I believe it was meant to play out the other way, that. Mr. Temple was meant to lose. This would give the impression that the barristers were not targeting me, while actually targeting me twice over. I was not supposed to see Mr. Temple's March 5th 2020 affidavit, but Garda Dully blundered by exhibiting it with his May 25th 2020 affidavit. Had I not seen it, then his fanciful claim that I had indemnified him would have gone unchallenged. He would have been advised to accept Dully's ''Bill of Costs'' for E276,397 and would have gotten the nod that he'd be looked after in suing me for the money. But Dully's blunder meant that I did challenge the claim and additionally got a letter from Mr. Temple promising that he would never sue me. Hence Mr. Temple's 'win'.
Unlike the legal crowd, I find Mr. Temple hard to read. He would generally follow his friend's lead without thinking, but only to the extent that it wouldn't mean breaking open the piggy bank [To date, Mr. Temple has repaid a mere E3,000 of the E32,750 I loaned to assist him in fighting his case. By comparison, the financially constrained Mr. McCaul has repaid E4,000 of the E25,000 I loaned him to assist him in fighting his case]. The instruction to them from Abbotstown on May 23rd 2019 would have been to follow everything the barristers (in particular, Cormac O Dulachain SC and John Hayden BL) told them to do and they would not get hurt. Mr. Temple was betrayed to some extent, in that he was later given an almighty fright. But that would almost certainly have more to do with the settling of old scores within Athlone Fianna Fail than with anything connected to the court case.
There are other issues in the judgment, such as the use of the doctrine of indoor management (the idea that Dully's negotiators could not be expected to know what was going on inside our company) to bypass the many illegalities in the 'settlement'. This argument might or might not be legally legitimate. Civil law is bendy, which is presumably why it attracts so many bendy characters. It is also where the serious money awaits the vultures.
It should be noted that one of the solicitors who I had reported to the Legal Services Regulatory Authority wrote to that authority in December 2021 and proposed, as an implied alternative to answering the accusations against him, that the LSRA wait until the Court of Appeal had made its decision. That was how I could make the prediction at the end of my last post that the judgment would be ''disingenuous bullshit'' (I was wrong about it being ''unreadably technical''). He clearly knew. But how could he know? A High Court judge is a close friend of his, so that seems a likely source. But how could a High Court judge, or any outsider, have access to the content of a judgment in advance? Just putting it out there (speaking purely hypothetically, of course), but is it possible that in Ireland a judge would be granted access to the same judges who are deciding on the appeal of his or her own judgment?
One way or another, judicial favours have clearly been requested and granted, contrary to the judicial oath which is enshrined in our country's constitution (though atheist judges may argue that they are exempt from its requirements) - ''without fear or favour''. It should be noted that back in the days when I was fighting our first legal team to get our basic evidence into court, they would sometimes go into a near panic in their determination to stop it. At no time was there any sense that judges would look after them to the extent of pretending that evidence didn't exist. That can only be being done as not just a favour, but as a very special favour.
The big question as ever is why? Why would judges demean their profession by shadow banning swathes of evidence? My guess is that they have been persuaded that the fraud is too big to fail. It is there in broad daylight (and the planting of documents in only a little light shade), in the judgments that switched the beneficiary club. They have been persuaded that it would de dangerous to the legal industry if such behaviour became public knowledge. And they have been persuaded that the situation is manageable, that the media will never print the story nor the Gardai investigate it. I therefore find myself in the position of whistleblower, forced into it because (unless I am pleasantly surprised by our current legal team) it is the only route to justice that is available to us. Whistleblower is never a popular position to be in, it always attracts thugs and mudslingers. I am nobody and they are the second highest paid judges in the world. Our judges don't have to abide by standards of decency or even law to be hugely respected. That comes with the title alone.
In other words, their advisor(s) was/were on the ball. The situation is entirely manageable.
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