Gayle Killilea-Dunne, the wife of insolvent property developer Seán Dunne, has sought to block a legal action taken by his US bankruptcy official to recover millions of euro in assets he transferred to her.
Ms Killilea Dunne, a former newspaper gossip columnist, has asked the US District Court of Connecticut to refuse a request by Mr Dunne's bankruptcy trustee to take up a near three-year-old lawsuit started by the National Asset Management Agency against the couple and stop him moving it from a US state court to federal court.
The move is the latest in long-running Irish and American court actions involving the couple and attempts by Nama and officials overseeing his bankruptcies in Ireland and the US to recover assets.
Nama, which has a judgment of €185 million against the Co Carlow-born developer, started a legal action in the Connecticut state court in 2012 claiming that money used to buy properties in the US had been fraudulently transferred to Ms Killilea-Dunne and was in fact his.
Mr Dunne's trustee, bankruptcy lawyer Richard Coan, applied to the US District Court last month to take up Nama's action and have it transferred to the federal court in a bid to reverse the transfer of assets, comprising cash and properties in Ireland and South Africa.
Ms Killilea Dunne's lawyer asked the US District Court on Thursday to refuse to allow Mr Coan to transfer Nama's action to the court because he did not first seek the permission of Connecticut's bankruptcy court, where Mr Dunne has been a debtor since 2013.
She argued that the trustee is not a party to state court action and that Mr Coan has not said why he is seeking to set aside large transfers between the couple when Mr Dunne’s Irish bankruptcy official has been pursuing a similar action against them in Ireland since November.
“It is difficult to understand why the trustee now needs to join an action which has been stayed, and which is duplicative of or subsumed in the Irish assignee’s action against Killilea Dunne,” her lawyers said.
