Director disqualified after taking €1m from firm’s PayPal account

A man who siphoned off nearly €1 million from his business PayPal account to his own bank account has been disqualified by the High Court from acting as a company director for five years.

Alan Barrett (38), a director of wound-up online event registration website Eventelephant, had deprived charities and event organisers of hard-earned income which “the court cannot acknowledge sufficiently through its words”, Mr Justice Tony O’Connor said.

Barrett, of White Ash, Ashbourne, Co Meath, was joint owner of the company, which operated a self-service online event registration website allowing customers use the site to create their own web pages to advertise and sell tickets.

Eventelephant earned commission from processing payments for those tickets. Along with charities, its users included high-profile sports organisations including Arsenal and Newcastle football clubs and airlines such as British Airways. The judge pointed out the software developed for the company should have been designed to direct payments to a trust account or to the account of the event organiser.

Accounts

The €967,276 “siphoned off” by Barrett instead went into a PayPal account Barrett controlled and on to Barrett’s own bank account, he said.

The judge ruled, while no allegation of dishonesty was made against Barrett’s co-director, Ron Downey (69), a UK citizen, he would accede to an application from the liquidators of the company to impose sanction on him too.

He ordered Downey be restricted from involvement in a company for five years unless such a firm has a share capital of not less than €500,000, if it is a public liability company, or €100,000 in the case of any other company.

Mr Justice O’Connor said Downey never explained if and when he sought proper assurances about company income and he should have know what the volume of sales was.

The repeated “vacuous excuses” offered by his co-director, Barrett, in referring to “chargeback difficulties” – and which gave rise to a media expose in 2013 – were accepted by Downey without delving further, he said.

The judge said “naivety and total ignorance of potential deception” does not excuse the necessity for directors like Downey to seek more than an oral assurance without further inquiry.

Improper returns

In relation to Barrett, whose assets and accounts were frozen by the court in August 2013, the judge said he had not disputed any of the facts asserted by the liquidators, Joseph Walsh and Neil Hughes. He had also pleaded guilty in another court to failing to make proper PAYE and VAT returns.

In view of the undisputed wrongful actions of Barrett, he should be disqualified, the judge said. As there was no evidence of aggravating circumstances which could affect the public in the future, he imposed the minimum disqualification of five years.