The Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement wants the High Court to determine if information seized from the FAI’s offices on foot of a search warrant contains privileged material.
The documents relate to the FAI’s previous CEO Mr John Delaney.
The application, which was briefly mentioned before Ms Justice Leonie Reynolds today, comes as part of the ODCE’s on-going inquiry into certain matters concerning the association.
The application, which came before the court on an ex-parte basis, was made by Elva Duffy Bl for the ODCE under various sections 2014 Companies Act.
The search warrant was issued last week and executed last Friday, 14 February at the FAI’s offices at The National Sports Campus at Abbottstown.
The Judge will now decide whether or not the seized documents are legally privileged and cannot be used as part of the corporate watchdog’s investigation.
The Judge, who said that the documents may raise private issues regarding Mr Delaney and suggested that he should be made a notice party to the application, adjourned the matter to later this week.
Last year the court made rulings in relation to whether other documents were legally privileged and if they could be used as part of the ODCE’s investigation.
In July Ms Justice Reynolds ruled that extracts of documents the FAI has given to the ODCE are covered by professional legal privileged and cannot be used as part of the probe into certain matters concerning the association.
In those proceedings the ODCE asked the High Court to determine if certain parts of documents provided to it by both the FAI and its auditors Deloitte Ireland LLP were legally privileged.
Ms Justice Leonie Reynolds ruled that the contents of some 14 passages in 16 documents provided by the FAI and Deloitte contain legally privileged material and cannot be used in the investigation.
The Judge ordered that the passages where legal privilege applied were to be redacted to ensure they remain unseen by the ODCE as part of its investigation.
The material at the centre of that application included details contained in the minutes of several meetings of the FAI’s board of management held between February 2016 and March 2019.
The FAI had claimed privilege over the extracts of those documents, in order to protect the FAI’s position against third parties, and not the ODCE.
