A nursing home operator is seeking to prevent the advertisement of its winding-up petition, claiming it is solvent and does not owe some €178,000 to the petitioning company.
Co Galway-based Caiseal Geal Teoranta is planning to ask the High Court for an injunction that would temporarily restrain Lough Corrib Nursing Home Limited and its director, Richard Keane, from publishing the petition.
It is claimed in documents before the court that the “nuclear” threat to wind up the company over a disputed debt is “entirely improper and inappropriate” in circumstances where Caiseal is not insolvent and is meeting its debts as they fall due.
A date for the hearing of the petition in the High Court is currently listed for next Monday, March 28th.
On Tuesday, Mr Justice Senan Allen gave permission on an ex-parte basis (only Caiseal was represented in court) for Caiseal to bring its injunction motion later this week.
In a sworn statement, one of Caiseal’s directors, Joseph Stanley, said the winding-up petition appears to be grounded upon a demand by petitioner Lough Corrib for payment of €177,765, which that company says is due and owing.
‘Manifest abuse’
Mr Stanley claimed the petition is a “manifest abuse” of court processes considering the sum is “disputed in full” by Caiseal, whose directors include himself, Mr Keane and Michael McGrath. Each of the directors owns a third of the company’s shares.
Prior to the company’s inception in 2012, the trio had been independently involved in the running of nursing homes.
This disputed amount, claims Mr Stanley, was not paid by Lough Corrib but by Mr Keane personally as part of a director’s loan. Mr Stanley said all three of Caiseal’s directors made personal loan contributions to the company to part-fund the construction of a new nursing home to be owned and operated by the company.
It is claimed the shareholder loans were described in a financing proposal submitted to Allied Irish Banks in 2012, which advanced development funds of some €2.8 million.
Personal input
Mr Stanley alleges Mr Keane has “wrongly sought to re-characterise” part of his personal input to the company as being a loan from Lough Corrib, in which he owns a 50 per cent stake. Any sum due to Mr Keane, or any of the shareholders, could not be demanded and was not due to be repaid without the consent of AIB and until cash flow facilitated it, said Mr Stanley.
Mr Stanley said it is “entirely improper” that the significant dispute over the alleged sum should be litigated by way of a winding-up petition. The advertisement of the petition would be “enormously prejudicial” to the company, including bringing a risk that its principal creditor, AIB, would take enforcement action.
The case returns before the court on Friday.
