I’m not paying up just yet, sunshine!
€3m Lotto winner gets delay on giving stepson €564k
€3.4m the amount of the disputed Lotto win
A STEPMOTHER who was ordered to pay her stepson his €564,000 share of a €3.4million Lotto win has won a ‘stay of execution’ that removes her obligation to pay up.
Mary Walsh gets to keep her mansion and €35,000 car safe for now while she appeals against the verdict – in a case which starts today.
The 66-year-old hairdresser won the jackpot in January 2011 and collected the winnings on behalf of a six-person family ‘syndicate’.
However, she did not distribute the winnings equally and gave nothing to her 52-year-old painter and decorator stepson David Walsh, the High Court heard.
Mr Walsh went on to sue his stepmother for his share, and on February 2 last, after a seven-day hearing, a High Court judge ordered his stepmother to pay her stepson €564,000, describing her as ‘capable of very significant calculation and design’.
Ever since, Mr Walsh has been fighting to make his stepmother pay up by making various applications to the High Court, including asking the court to declare him the owner of a mansion that Mrs Walsh bought with a chunk of the winnings.
Following the Lotto win, Mrs Walsh moved into the palatial Perssepark mansion in Ballinasloe, Co. Galway – a property she recently claimed is worth about €480,000.
The court also heard that Mrs Walsh has a car worth about €35,000 and a further €6,000 in bank accounts – although Mr Walsh had indicated that he wished to focus on assets ‘of major significance’.
But as revealed by the Irish Daily Mail on February 23, Mrs Walsh lodged an appeal against the February 2 verdict, which is due to begin in the Court of Appeal today. She wasn’t expected to seek any initial orders relating to her appeal until this week’s hearing.
But yesterday, Ken Bredin BL, for Mr Walsh, revealed in the High Court that Mrs Walsh’s lawyers had already secured a ‘stay of execution’ from appeal judges after securing an emergency sitting of the Court of Appeal in recent days.
This means that Mrs Walsh won’t be obliged to pay anything until the outcome of her appeal. It also keeps her assets safe in the meantime.
Mr Walsh had taken out a ‘tracing claim’ on his stepmother’s assets, which showed that the house and Zurich Life investment policies worth €141,000 were ‘both purchased with Lotto monies,’ the High Court had heard.
This month, the High Court also heard that Mr Walsh had already registered judgment mortgages against Perssepark and another property owned by Mrs Walsh – a ‘site’ worth about €15,000 – with a view to taking possession of them. Mr Walsh’s lawyers said it was their contention that those assets ‘are in fact the plaintiff’s [David Walsh’s] assets’ by virtue of the High Court’s judgment in his favour.
Mr Walsh has asked the court for ‘a declaration that he is the beneficial owner of those assets’ so that he can ultimately ‘execute and enforce’ against them.
However, the stay granted by the Court of Appeal means that Mr Walsh won’t be able to make any further progress on those fronts for the time being.
If Mrs Walsh wins her appeal, she won’t ever have to pay Mr Walsh his share.
In the High Court on February 2, Judge Richard Humphreys concluded that Mrs Walsh was ‘unreliable’ in the witness box and ‘ducked and weaved’ in her attempts to defend herself. The judge also found that she swore a ‘false’ affidavit to Revenue after the Lotto win in order to ‘conceal her assets from persons including the plaintiff [Mr Walsh]’.
In her appeal, Mrs Walsh will also challenge freezing orders on her assets, which currently remain in place. On February 13, the High Court froze all of her assets – apart from her €233-aweek old age pension – after hearing that she had ‘only €673,000 left of the €3.38million’.
Her appeal opens this morning before senior judges Mary Finlay Geoghegan, Michael Peart and Mary Irvine. Mr Walsh, of Knocknagreena, Ballinasloe, has been fighting his stepmother for his one-sixth share of the Lotto win through the courts since 2013.
Mrs Walsh had signed the back of her €12 Lotto ticket six years ago along with five other family members including her stepson.