Charity director fined for accounting failure
THE widow of the late founder of suicide prevention charity Console has been fined €1,500 after pleading guilty to failing to keep proper books of account as a director of the company.
Patricia Kelly, 61, was the wife of the charity’s former chief executive, the late Paul Kelly.
Console was set up in 2006 to provide services on a voluntary basis to people who suffered bereavement due to suicide.
Mr Kelly and his wife were listed as company directors of the registered charity.
Dublin Circuit Criminal Court was told yesterday that the charity received funding totalling €2.03 million between 2010 and 2016, mostly from the HSE.
Kelly of Alexandra Manor, Clane, Co. Kildare, pleaded guilty to one count of failure, other than wilfully, to keep proper books of account as a director of a company, contrary to the Companies Act, 1990, between December 2006 and May 2015.
The court heard that the Director of Public Prosecutions was not pursuing other charges against
Kelly after accepting a guilty plea on the basis that it was not a ‘wilful’ failure, and as such, she could not be imprisoned for the offence. The maximum fine available to the court for this offence is €10,000.
The court was told that 96 payments – totalling €223,000 – made between 2006 and 2015 were traced by the investigation to accounts controlled by Mr Kelly, which also named his wife as an account-holder.
Prosecuting counsel Shane Costelloe said the ‘lion’s share’ of the prosecution was directed against Mr Kelly, and it seemed he was the person controlling the accounts into which payments were made. Mr Costelloe said that while Kelly was named on the accounts, there were issues with signatures, and the prosecution was unable to confirm that she was the person who had signed certain documents. Charity boss Mr Kelly had been facing multiple charges but he died by suicide in February 2020, the court heard.
Judge Martin Nolan yesterday said: ‘It seems while the State may have its suspicions, at a certain point it came to the conclusion it could not prove the allegations, so it adopted a position in that it accepted a plea.’
The judge said the investigation took ‘hundreds or thousands of hours and liquidators were involved and the main person they were interested in is no longer with us’.
He imposed a fine of €1,500 with six months to pay. Kelly is also automatically disqualified as a director for five years.
Detective Garda Garry Callinan of the Corporate Enforcement Authority said that when a receiver was appointed to the charity, they became aware that documents had been moved offsite. An order was obtained for these records, which included hard drives analysed as part of the investigation.
During the investigation, it became clear that some people were unknowingly listed as directors and that inaccurate or incorrect accounts were submitted to the Companies Registration Office. The charity is in liquidation.
Fraudulent invoices paid by the charity were also identified, and the money was traced to personal accounts held by the couple.
‘State may have its suspicions’