The High Court will hear in full the fresh application for the appointment of an examiner to seven companies controlled by property developer Liam Carroll on Tuesday of next week.
Last Friday, the court decided that the companies should be allowed to bring their second application for court protection to a full hearing.
This morning, Mr Justice John Cooke outlined his reasons for that decision, saying the court was satisfied that allowing a second petition to be heard did not constitute an abuse of process or bad faith.
Vantive Holdings, Morston Investments, Royceton and the four other companies are seeking court protection from ACCBank, which is seeking to have them wound up over unpaid debts of €136m.
Counsel for ACC Bank, Lyndon McCann SC, said that at this stage the bank considered it might be better to hold over making a decision on a possible appeal to the Supreme Court until the High Court had heard the second application in full.
He said the bank intended filing affidavits in support of its opposition to the petition from a bank official, a property valuer, an economist and an insolvency practitioner. Counsel for the companies said they would be willing to provide their property valuations to ACC, on condition they were kept confidential until the next hearing.
Mr Justice Cooke fixed a date for the hearing of 11am on Tuesday week, and ordered that the creditors of the companies be notified of the petition and that the companies advertise their intention to bring the petition in two Irish and one Jersey-based newspaper.
In his explanation for last Friday's decision, Mr Justice Cooke said he believed there was no real difficulty under law with a second petition for examinership being presented by the same company or group of companies. He said the court did not agree with the claim made by counsel for ACC that the new petition was obviously doomed.
And he also disagreed with the argument by ACC that the presentation of a second very similar petition represented and abuse of process or bad faith, which would warrant its not proceeding to a full hearing. The judge said the absence of written support from the companies' banks in the first petition was less than satisfactory.
He said the court could have expected to hear which banks were asked for support, what was asked of them and what their response was. However, he did say it was not entirely surprising that banks were not willing to submit written support to a court in such economic times.
He said an argument was also made that the withholding of the companies' business plan and property valuations in the first petition was deliberate. But he said that, whatever the reason and however misguided or mistaken that decision, the decision did not appear to be a malevolent attempt to mislead the court, but rather Mr Carroll's desire to protect the valuations from being made public.
He said implicit in the proceedings was the suggestion that allowing the court hear the second application would let the shareholders away with something. He said that may well be the conclusion of the court when it examines the second application in full. But at this early stage of the process, the interests of employees, creditors and others - who are supposed to be central to the point of examinership - should not be influenced by the mistakes, misjudgements and perhaps misconduct of shareholders.
