Court rejects Sinn Féin challenge to financial sanctions

SINN FÉIN yesterday lost a legal bid to overturn financial sanctions imposed on it by the British Government because of IRA activity.

The High Court in Belfast refused the party permission for a judicial review of the decision to penalise it more than £100,000 last year.

Sinn Féin launched the court action after North Secretary Paul Murphy last April withdrew funding from its Assembly party.

He took action in the wake of a report from the Independent Monitoring Commission highlighted the level of paramilitary activity by both the IRA and loyalists and recommended sanctions against Sinn Féin and the loyalist Progressive Unionist Party.

The IMC last week recommended further sanctions against Sinn Féin because of its alleged knowledge and sanctioning of the IRA's £26.5 million Northern Bank robbery before Christmas.

Rejecting the application, Mr Justice Weatherup dismissed a Sinn Féin assertion that the IMC had no right to examine their activities and said Mr Murphy had been entitled to draw conclusions from the report from the IMC which accused the IRA of being behind the attempted abduction of dissident republican Bobby Tohill from a Belfast bar last February.

The judge ruled that the IMC was within its terms of reference when it recommended sanctions against Sinn Féin .

And he said Sinn Féin could not claim procedural unfairness when they had not been prepared to talk to the IMC.

Costs were awarded against Sinn Féin.

Outside the court, senior Sinn Féin member, Gerry Kelly, branded the ruling political and said the IMC was outside the Good Friday Agreement.

The North Belfast Assembly member said: "In the years that republicans have gone to the courts, they would not be overly surprised at the kind of political decision made today and let me be clear, it was a political decision."

He said the IMC was outside the Good Friday Agreement, as were the powers the Government had taken to impose sanctions.

Mr Kelly said the party would be studying the ruling with its lawyers to see whether they were any other avenues open to them.