More news in brief.
Hotel owner provided bogus cert
A Dublin businessman told a judge yesterday he had misled a building society into believing a woman had worked for his hotel and had earned £30,000 a year there.
Brian McGill, owner of the Harcourt Hotel, Dublin, said he had provided a fraudulent certificate of earnings to Catherine Fitzpatrick Butler so that Irish Life would provide her with a mortgage.
He was giving evidence in a legal row between Fred Walker and Ms Butler over their financial interests in their €825,000 former home at Whitechurch Road, Rathfarnham, Dublin.
Mr McGill told Judge Joseph Matthews in the Circuit Civil Court that Mr Walker and Ms Butler had approached him to help raise a £52,000 mortgage for the purchase of the house in 1997. He was told Mr Walker, because of a low credit rating and judgments outstanding against him, could not apply for the mortgage, nor could his name go on the deeds of the house.
Mr McGill was aware Ms Butler's low earnings were not enough to satisfy a building society. "I took a concrete step to help them and at some stage I gave Ms Butler a certificate of earnings although she did not work for me and I was not her employer." He told Judge Matthews he wanted "to do a turn" for them.
When the judge said a certificate of earnings purported to specify accurately a person's earnings, Mr McGill said: "I simply said she worked in the Harcourt Hotel. It wasn't true. I knew it was a figure that was probably needed in order for her to get a mortgage."
Mr Walker, now Landscape Road, Churchtown, Dublin, earlier told the court he had approached Mr McGill, a friend, because Ms Butler's earnings were only £9,000 and there was no way they could have raised a mortgage. Mr Walker said they had bought the house as a joint venture and he intended making the mortgage repayments. He claimed to have paid the mortgage for six years before their break-up and believed they were "50-50" in everything.
Ms Butler said she had paid a £30,000 deposit, the nett proceeds from her previous home following the break-up of her marriage. She said the mortgage was paid monthly from financial contributions paid into the household by Mr Walker.
She told counsel for Mr Walker that she had never intended him to own "a brick or blade of grass" of the property and he had been aware of this from the start.
While she and Mr Walker lived together as lovers from 1997 until their break-up in 2003, he had never been more than "a much-loved lodger". Judge Matthews awarded Mr Walker €125,000 as his share of the property.
Woman killed in Offaly car crash
A 19-year-old woman was killed yesterday when the car she was driving crashed into a ditch in Edenderry, Co Offaly. The single-vehicle crash occurred at 6.40am at The Derries, 3km from Edenderry.
Pair acquitted of assault, damage
A jury at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court has acquitted a man and woman accused of assault and causing criminal damage in their city centre flat. Robert Day (35), O'Devaney Gardens, Dublin, and Jacqueline Reynolds (39) Rory O'Connell House, Dublin, were found not guilty after just 30 minutes on day nine of the trial. They had denied assaulting Mark and Esther Uzell and causing criminal damage to a door in their flat at St Andrew's Court on December 13th, 2004.
€700,000 for car crash injuries
The High Court has approved a settlement of €700,000 for a man who sustained severe head and abdominal injuries in a road crash. James Gibbons jnr (27) also lost a kidney and a spleen after the vehicle in which he was a front-seat passenger went out of control and crashed at Batterstown, Dunboyne, Co Meath, in October 1999.