London move not to exploit law - O'Donnell

Property investor Mary Patricia O’Donnell, who is seeking to become bankrupt in Britain with her husband, Brian, has insisted their move to London is not a fabrication to exploit softer bankruptcy laws there.

Acknowledging reluctantly that her bankruptcy petition filed last March has errors, she said the mistakes are proof of the application’s truthfulness. “If, as you are suggesting, or implying that this isn’t true, we would have had this set up perfectly; we wouldn’t have been missing a beat,” she told Bank of Ireland’s barrister Gabriel Moss

During frequently emotional evidence before Mr Justice Newey in the High Court in London, she said the bank, which is challenging the bankruptcy petitions, were “not interested in recovering” the €71 million owed to them. “Short of executing us, I don’t know what more we could have done. Their behaviour has been atrocious. They have destroyed their own security,” she told Mr Moss.

Listing faults in the petition, Mr Moss said she had given an address for offices in Dublin as her residential address, even though the building had been seized a year before by the bank. The petition also did not list her husband’s current £120,000-a-year property consultancy contract.

Despite repeated challenges, Dr O’Donnell insisted the couple’s centre of main interest was in London since 2005, even though she has registered only in recent months for UK tax and national insurance.

Dr O’Donnell said her youngest daughter would have been 13 in 2005 when she started to spend significant time in London, but “the older children were old enough to look after her”, while her daughter had a large group of friends and frequent sleep-overs.

Tax returns

She had given details of her own tax returns for 2010 and earlier to Bank of Ireland, as demanded, she said, though Mr Moss produced letters – one dated November 8th – showing that discovery had not been made.

Launching one of numerous attacks upon Bank of Ireland, she said her daughter had been a grade A student but had had to split the taking of her exams at Trinity because of the distress of the bank’s actions against the couple.

“This is as a direct result of the media onslaught and breach of privacy that we have had to suffer,” said Dr O’Donnell, who gave a half-day’s evidence before Mr Justice Newey on the back of medical evidence about the state of her health.

A legal row over ownership of the contents of the luxury family home in Co Dublin of solicitor Brian O’Donnell and of another luxury property in London where he is now living has been settled at the Commercial Court.

No details of the settlement, understood to be subject to a confidentiality clause, were disclosed.