Gardaí can seek warrant to search solicitor’s phone
A RETIRED Taxing Master of the High Court, who is a suspect in a long-running money-laundering investigation, has lost a bid to prevent gardaí applying for a warrant to search the contents of his mobile phone.
Judge Anthony Barr said the background to the case involving solicitor James Flynn and his Dublin firm, JT Flynn and Co., was ‘unusual and complex’.
In a judgment published yesterday, he said Mr Flynn’s client, ‘LS’, had maintained that he had been repaid a loan of €10,000 in cash by a man in Carrickmacross.
The client’s wife is said to have placed the cash, in an envelope, in or near a furnace, at her husband’s workshop. The notes were retrieved, but were damaged.
In 2019, LS tried to exchange just under €5,000 worth of the damaged notes for new ones, through the Central Bank of Ireland. The bank initially refused, but following a legal challenge by LS the exchange was carried out.
Judge Barr said LS had paid Mr Flynn with cash from the original batch of damaged notes.
An employee of Mr Flynn’s firm lodged the notes, but the Central Bank referred the matter to gardaí, under a law requiring it to report suspected fraud. Further legal action followed against the Central Bank, involving both LS and Mr Flynn, but Judge Barr said it was ultimately unsuccessful.
He said the gardaí began to investigate the second set of bank notes over suspected moneylaundering offences. In early March 2022, the judge said, Detective Sergeant Gary Sheridan applied to the District Court for a search warrant for the solicitor’s offices.
The detective stated that a former employee of Mr Flynn’s, Sandra Daly, had informed gardaí that she was told by Mr Flynn that seeking exchange of damaged banknotes was going to be an ongoing process ‘once a week’.
‘He [Det. Sgt Sheridan] stated that in his experience, that was typical of a money laundering technique known as “smurfing”, whereby large amounts of cash are broken into multiple smaller transactions to avoid suspicion and evade regulatory reporting limits,’ the judge said.
‘He stated that it was the belief of investigating gardaí, that that activity was indicative of an attempt by the applicant to launder funds on behalf of LS and that he was either reckless or complicit in that process.’
Mr Flynn’s mobile phone was seized during the search of his offices. He sought an injunction to prevent gardaí obtaining a warrant to access the data on the mobile phone. His counsel told the High Court that a person’s privacy was at stake during a search of their phone, and where that person was a solicitor, there were also issues of legal professional privilege surrounding their conversations with clients. He said those rights would be ‘irreparably damaged’ if the warrant was granted. Judge Barr said he would not prevent the gardaí from applying to the District Court for a warrant to search the phone.
Mr Flynn was appointed Taxing Master of the High Court and Supreme Court of Ireland in 1995. He retired from that position in 2011 and became a member of the Bar Council of Ireland.