IIB Bank has secured a temporary High Court order against a Dublin solicitor restraining him from reducing his assets below €9 million, and also freezing bank accounts in his name.
The order was made against Thomas Byrne, practising as Thomas Byrne and Company, Walkinstown Road, Dublin, and also with an office in Sandyford Industrial Estate in south Dublin.
The interim injunction was granted by Mr Justice Frank Clarke in a late afternoon application on Monday and was returned to yesterday. The injunction was made on an ex parte basis, one side only represented. It is understood the Law Society initiated proceedings yesterday against Mr Byrne, also on an ex parte basis. However, on the application of the society, those proceedings were heard in private.
In its application before Mr Justice Clarke, IIB sought and secured an interim injunction restraining Mr Byrne from reducing, dealing with or disposing of assets below €9 million.
It also secured an order restraining Mr Byrne from dealing with any sums in his account with National Irish Bank or other bank accounts.
It is believed a number of other banks, including Anglo Irish Bank, are owed money by Mr Byrne, and may make representations in court today. In recent days they have been working to assess their liabilities.
A notice has been posted by the Law Society in the window of Mr Byrne's practice on Walkinstown Road informing clients that the practice has been closed. It says it has removed clients' files for safekeeping, and advises clients to instruct new solicitors, to whom it will forward files.
Mr Byrne is listed as a director of two companies - Compass Property Development and Spanish Golf Club Rentals, according to records at the Companies Registration Office. His address on the company records is listed as 78 Walkinstown Road, Dublin 12, the same address as his legal practice.
He is an investor in Spanish Golf Club Rentals, which was set up last year to rent golf clubs to holiday travellers to Spain who found the cost of transporting their own clubs on flights to be too expensive.
Mr Byrne is also involved in property development. In July he received planning permission to demolish five semi-detached houses on the Greenhills Road in Walkinstown and to replace them with one five-storey and four four-storey blocks of an office and apartment development.
Mr Byrne (41) is originally from Walkinstown, and studied law at University College Dublin. He was admitted as a solicitor in March 1991, and opened his practice in Walkinstown five years ago and the Sandyford office in 2005. His practice had fee income of €3.5 million in 2004.
In recent years to attract new clients to his practice Mr Byrne has held breakfast seminars for clients on topics such as labour and employment law. In November 2004 he hosted an event for potential corporate clients; the guest speaker was former British Conservative minister Michael Portillo.
In December 2006, Mr Byrne was found guilty of misconduct by the Law Society for allowing a deficit of €1,696,969 million on his client account as of May 31st, 2005, and for allowing personal transactions of his own to be drawn from the client bank account.
He was censured by the Law Society and ordered to pay €15,000 to the society's compensation fund. That sum is the maximum which can be imposed.