Scottish national could face difficulties in suing CAB

A SCOTTISH national targeted by the Criminal Assets Bureau may find it difficult to successfully sue the agency for damages, legal sources said yesterday. Lindsay Craft is thought to be considering legal action against CAB after its case against him collapsed.

CAB accepted it could not win an appeal in the Supreme Court against the High Court’s refusal to grant a judgment of £350,000 (€444,500) for alleged unpaid income tax and interest against Mr Craft.

CAB’s decision not to proceed followed a Supreme Court ruling in a separate case last March. This had found that CAB had not followed proper procedures in seeking money alleged to be owed to the State.

As CAB had not followed these procedures in Mr Craft’s case, senior officers decided there was no point in going ahead.

In the March case the Supreme Court overturned a High Court judgment for €2.25m granted to CAB against Dublin businessman Sean Hunt.

The court found CAB had not fully complied with Revenue procedures in assessing the alleged outstanding taxes of Mr Hunt. Furthermore, Mr Hunt had not been given the time allowed to appeal the assessment to an independent commissioner.

“Under the law, people are given 30 days to appeal an assessment. When that expires without appeal, then the assessment is final. In the Hunt case and the Craft case, CAB, for some reason, didn’t allow for that,” said a legal source.

“They tried to recover the taxes without giving recourse to the appeals commissioner and the Circuit Court. The Supreme Court said that can’t be done,” he said.

A spokesman for CAB said that they were considering the Craft judgment. The spokesman said that at the time, their legal advice in both cases was that they could carry out their work.

He pointed out that they were going back to the High Court to secure an assessment against Mr Hunt. He said that the Supreme Court had ruled that their method of collection had been wrong, not their actual assessment.

He said they hadn’t decided what to do in Mr Craft’s case. He said that if Mr Craft’s lawyers intended to sue for damages then they would have to make their case before the courts.

Legal sources yesterday suggested Mr Craft’s lawyers would probably claim that CAB had breached their client’s rights to proper procedures.

But one senior legal source didn’t fancy their chances: “They would have to show CAB acted in bad faith, and acted maliciously, and deliberately set out to contravene his rights. That would be difficult to prove,” he said.