Court rejects Delaney’s bid to hear appeal over FAI documents
JOHN Delaney has lost a bid to bring a Supreme Court appeal over legal privilege he had claimed for more than a 1,000 emails seized from Football Association of Ireland offices by the Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE).
The ODCE, which has now become the Corporate Enforcement Authority, wants to use the materials covering a 17-year period as part of its ongoing inquiry into suspected criminal wrongdoing at the FAI.
In October 2022, High Court Judge Leonie Reynolds ruled former FAI chief Mr Delaney had made ‘vague and nebulous claims which are wholly unsubstantiated’ and he had ‘resolutely failed’ to justify why the digital documents could not be investigated by the watchdog.
She was also critical of his ‘repeated protestations’ of a lack of resources and time and contrasted it to the FAI’s ‘constructive approach’ despite having fewer resources and a ‘markedly tighter time frame’.
By that stage, the High Court had spent more than two years dealing with issues arising out of the ODCE’s seizure of 280,000 documents.
The ODCE was acting on a district court search warrant which enabled it to raid the FAI’s headquarters in Abbotstown in February 2020. Mr Delaney had asserted legal professional privilege over 1,123 documents, taken from his work email folder.
He said these contained legal advice given to him regarding litigation that occurred during the many years he was with the association.
Mr Delaney stated that 566 files related to family law proceedings, 301 files concerned defamation proceedings, 71 files related to a shareholder dispute in which he was involved, and most of the remainder related to property transactions.
He went to the Court of Appeal, but in September last year it rejected his appeal against the High Court judgment, ruling that his claim appeared to be a ‘deliberate attempt to shield documents from disclosure which he does not wish to disclose’. He then appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing that his case raised points of law of public importance about how search warrants were executed under the 2014 Companies Act, and issues relating to privilege.
However, yesterday Supreme Court Judges Donal O’Donnell, Iseult O’Malley and Gerard Hogan found it was ‘not in the interests of justice’ to allow a further appeal.
To do so, the judges held, would be ‘to allow a further hearing of arguments that have already been fully ventilated in both the High Court and the Court of Appeal.’
They said the procedures used to assess the legal professional privilege of the documents did not raise any issue of complexity
‘Vague and nebulous claims’
or general public importance.
It has been estimated that Mr Delaney, who is now based in England, will face a legal bill of €2million following his three failed cases.
It comes as the four-year anniversary of the initial raid on the FAI offices approaches.
The ruling clears the way for the stalled Corporate Enforcement Authority criminal investigation into Mr Delaney and the FAI to proceed. Once his FAI emails have been reviewed by investigators, a number of potential witnesses are expected to be formally interviewed.