In the high-stakes trial, Coan et al. v. Dunne et al., Attorney Thomas H. Curran, representing Chapter 7 Trustee Richard M. Coan, successfully exposed the Irish developer Sean Dunne and his wife, Gayle Killilea’s unsuccessful attempt to escape from Ireland to the United States amid financial pressures and their continuously failing efforts to circumvent creditors and their transfer of hundreds of millions of euros worth of assets for no consideration in both the United States, Ireland, Switzerland, England and South Africa. However, this was no straightforward victory.
Dunne’s reluctance to cooperate with bankruptcy officials in each one of the cases prolonged the period of the bankruptcy proceedings, making the process extremely difficult. Specifically, in October 2018, due to Dunne’s “willful and deliberate” failure to cooperate with the court-appointed government official handling his Irish bankruptcy, the Irish High Court extended Dunne’s bankruptcy for nearly 12 additional years, unlike the original automatic discharge date of July 2016. As a result, this was the most prolonged extension by the Irish courts since the post-crisis bankruptcy regime that was overhauled in 2012. Justice Caroline Costello stated that Dunne was “deeply dishonest” and engaged in “wholesale non-compliance” of his statutory obligations and showed “incredible attitude.” An additional Irish judge characterized Dunne’s actions in his Irish bankruptcy proceedings “as a cynical, spurious attempt to preserve the illusion of cooperation in order to achieve a discharge from bankruptcy.”
Despite Dunne’s unprofessional etiquette during the proceedings, Attorney Curran and the Thomas H. Curran Associates’ team remained resolute and uncovered Dunne’s meticulous scheme to commit international financial fraud and successfully presented same to the Judge and Jury, by providing extensive evidence which included fabricated documents transferring assets amounting to millions of dollars.
You can read the full article at: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/commercial-property/sean-dunne-s-escape-from-bankruptcy-foiled-by-incredible-attitude-1.3649471#:~:text=On%20Tuesday%2C%20the%20High%20Court,Irish%20bankruptcy%20since%20July%202013.